[AstroPy] Ubuntu packages and state of AstroLib

[Sergio Pascual]

2011/3/17 Ole Streicher <astropy at liska.ath.cx>:
> 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 since it is superceded by wcslib, except maybe for some legacy code.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?

To put it in a few words: some parts of wcslib are in wcstools. There
are a lot more things that are in wcstools and not in wcslib
(functions related with astrometry, catalogue search, etc.)

I included wcstools in Fedora only because is used by ds9, but the
name colision with wcslib is very inconvenient. In your case, I would
forget about wcstools

Regards

>
> Cheers
>
> Ole
>
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-- 
Sergio Pascual                        http://guaix.fis.ucm.es/~spr
gpg fingerprint: 5203 B42D 86A0 5649 410A F4AC A35F D465 F263 BCCC
Departamento de Astrofísica -- Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)