[AstroPy] [astropy-dev] ANN: Astropy v0.1

Thomas Robitaille thomas.robitaille at gmail.com
Tue Jun 19 15:13:40 EDT 2012


Just to be clear, astropy.io.fits is basically a direct port of
pyfits, astropy.wcs is a direct port of pywcs, and astropy.io.ascii is
a direct port of asciitable, so those components are likely to be as
stable as the original packages themselves. If you are using those
components, then you should be fine. However, astropy 0.1 is of course
an alpha release, so the package as a whole is still going to evolve
significantly, with a number of new components planned.

Cheers,
Tom

On 19 June 2012 21:04, Joe Harrington <jh at physics.ucf.edu> wrote:
> I'm happy with that, but it should be clearly documented in a central,
> well-known place, so that people know what they can and can't depend on
> to be stable.  If I'm writing software for a spacecraft project or
> instrument calibration pipeline that MUST be long-term stable, I might
> choose to use pyfits (now stable) but not NDData (not stable).  A
> student working on a homework assignment might safely use NDData.
>
> --jh--
>
> On Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:40:31 -0400 Wolfgang Kerzendorf
> <wkerzendorf at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Joe,
>>
>> I would think that many other things (NDData as one prime example) are
>> still i> n high alpha. I think with many of these new functions we
>> will have t> o iterate somewhat between developing - usage feedback to
>> get to > a stable interface. I think this release shows relatively
>> well what w> ill be there (there's likely going to be a class called
>> nddata) b> ut that their interfaces might change.
>>
>> Cheers
>>   W
>> On 2012-06-19, at 1:25 PM, Joe Harrington wrote:
>>
>> >> Nevertheless, you can already make use of the existing functionality,
>> >> which is fully tested. Key features include:
>> >
>> > Excellent news!
>> >
>> > The question "when to switch" comes up.  I'm sure some parts (pyfits,
>> > pywcs, etc) are very stable and the calling syntax, data objects,
>> > etc. won't change in the future.  I'm equally sure some things are still
>> > highly alpha.  Would it make sense to provide a list
>> > (help(astropy.stability())?) that lays out what you can depend on and
>> > where you should or might expect changes?  Or, is there a pathway from
>> > public code development with public usage and the understanding that
>> > it might change, to freezing it and including it in astropy, such that
>> > astropy is only mature, stable code?
>> >
>> > --jh--
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