[AstroPy] Ubuntu packages and state of AstroLib

[Ole Streicher]

Am 17.03.2011 16:28, schrieb Sergio Pascual:
> 2011/3/17 Michael Droettboom <mdroe at stsci.edu>:
>> As for the library naming confusion:  libwcs is from SAO/NRAO and
>> is shipped as part of wcstools [1].  wcslib is a standalone library
>> by Mark Calabretta [2].  The latter is what pywcs uses.  But
>> perhaps confusing is that wcstools will compile against either.
>> pywcs only supports wcslib.  I believe each of these has a common
>> ancestor, but wcslib has been updated more recently and has more
>> features.  You may end up having to call the package "libwcslib" to
>> avoid confusion, though perhaps "libwcs" will only ever be
>> installed as part of "wcstools".  For example, on Fedora, packages
>> exist for Calabretta's called "wcslib", and for "wcstools", which
>> includes libwcs.  I'm not familiar with the Debian/Ubuntu world on
>> this.
> 
> I would add here that wcstools is, as it name says, a set of tools 
> (programs). The base library of these programs is called libwcs.
> What is very unfortunate because it's the name of the library shipped
> with wcslib (there's an open bug in Fedora about that). wcstools
> contains code of some old version of wcslib.

No I am /really/ lost.

- wcslib-4.7 (or 4.4.4) is a separate packge maintained by Mark
  Calabretta, installs a lib "libwcs.a" (and .so's) in /usr/lib/

- wcstools-3.8.1 is a complete WCS utility toolkit that comes with
  its own "libwcs", that also compiles as static "libwcs.a". However,
  this library is not updated since 2 years.

- wcstools-3.8.1 may use Mark's wcslib-4.X instead of the builtin
  version (statement on the wcstools homepage)

>From there, I would not see any need to keep the wcstools-3.8.1/libwcs
since it is superceded by wcslib, except maybe for some legacy code. If
"wcstools-3.8.1/libwcs" is just an older version of "wcslib-4.7", one
would probably better opt for adopting wcslib-4.7 instead of using the
old library in the packaging process. If this does not work, one can
still provide the old library as "liblegacywcs" or similar. Is there
anything missing in this scenario?

Cheers

Ole