On 13 March 2012 10:17, OlŠµ Streicher <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Tim Jenness <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>>> Could you create a tarball for version 7 and upload it to
>>> <http://www.starlink.ac.uk/download/ast/>?
>
>> David will try to sort that out soon.
>
> That would help me much. Thank you.
Done. The new version can be obtained from
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/download/ast/ast-7.0.0.tar.gz
>>> Ooops, you are right. Did you contact Mark then? I worry a bit that we
>>> have so many patched versions of everything floating around in
>>> astronomy. Keeping things close together is IMO not the worst idea.
>
>> I'll let David comment on the motivations for a subtle fork of wcslib
>> for AST.
Yes - Mark knows about AST and it's use of wcslib. There are various
reasons for the fork:
1) "No dependencies" (or as close as we could get) was a design goal
for AST from day one. Tools like yum and apt-get and so on make
handling dependencies a lot easier these days, but there are still
lots of people who just want an AST source tall ball that they can use
without needing to mess around installing other things.
2) Mark decided to do things in wcslib that did not suit what we
wanted to do in AST
3) We had AST-specific requirements for wcslib that Mark was not keen
on adding to wcslib.
4) The cost of updating AST to handle changes in wcslib was greater
than the perceived benefit. Cost both in terms of the hours of effort
and the knock-on effects on the behaviour of AST.
David
>> If you search for SLA routines on google it will boggle your mind how
>> many applications come with their own bundled versions.
>
> I know, and it seems quite old-fashioned for me in a world of (linux)
> distributions that may package all libraries individually and share them
> :-)
>
> DS9 even takes this to the limit by including (patched) versions of
> almost everything -- from Tcl/Tk to AST and SLA. And the subpackages
> also include (patched) versions of other packages -- SLA is finally
> included twice (directly, and in AST), you find 2 versions of wcslib
> (one is your patched in AST), one wcstools lib etc. If Mark fixes a bug
> in wcslib, DS9 users have to wait until you include the patch into
> AST, and then William Joye includes the fixed AST into DS9.
>
> Best regards
>
> Ole
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