[AstroPy] POLL: vision for a common Astronomy package

[Mark Sienkiewicz]

On 7/8/11 1:42 PM, astropy at liska.ath.cx wrote:
> I think that the solution to provide an option for the use of external
> packages is a solution everyone agreed about?

Yes.

To summarize for anybody who has not been following this discussion closely:

--

Some portion of Astropy may want to use some C code that comes from an 
external library.

We can provide a copy of that library code along with Astropy.  For a 
user installing from source code, the python install just does the right 
thing; there is no need to download/compile/install the external package 
separately.

If we do provide the library, we also provide an option to the setup.py 
to explicitly say "use the library that is already installed <here> 
instead of the C sources distributed with Astropy".  A packager can use 
this option to integrate with other packages provided by the linux 
distribution.

--

So, we have a solution.  All of the rest of the discussion has centered 
around which group of users you think you need to worry about:  can use 
a package, or cannot use a package.

There are substantial use cases for both categories.  We have a solution 
that works well for both and at very little cost.

Otherwise, I think all we need to do is acknowledge that both use cases 
are important in different situations, and that we are happy to make 
them both work smoothly.

Mark S.