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

[Michael Droettboom]

On 06/20/2012 01:44 AM, Erik Tollerud wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Olе Streicher <astropy at liska.ath.cx> wrote:
>> * I very much like the idea of having the external C code in a specific
>>   diretory tree "cextern" since this makes it easier to split this part
>>   and use the versions provided with the OS. I would guess that also
>>   the "wcslib" part will move from pywcs to cextern?
> Mike D (the maintainer of astropy.wcs and pywcs) will know for sure,
> but I think his plan is to keep wcslib where it is, because the
> python-level wrapper is rather closely tied to the particular version
> of wcslib.  The idea is that cextern is for C code that is essentially
> included "wholly" (like extern), and things that are tightly coupled
> to the python code (including Cython .pyx files) will live in the
> python source tree.  There's more about  this is in the README file in
> the cextern directory.

Yes.  I also like the modularity of it -- if you want to produce an 
astropy without astropy.wcs, just delete the astropy/wcs directory. (Not 
that one would do that -- it just helps with maintenance down the road).

>
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 12:02 PM, Kacper Kowalik
> <xarthisius.kk at gmail.com> wrote:
>> speaking of which, are you willing to accept patches to make usage of
>> cextern/* as well as astropy/extern/*, optional?
> That's definitely in the pipeline as part of a larger system for
> dealing with optional dependencies, including things like scipy and
> matplotlib that we do *not* plan to bundle - see
> https://github.com/astropy/astropy/issues/63. If you want to take a
> stab at it, feel free! (Although you might want to email me separately
> if you want to dive into this, as it probably requires some thought
> about how to hook it into other parts of astropy)

For what it's worth, the only library in cextern at present is expat.  
If it fails to build, astropy.util.xml has fallback Python code to work 
around it (it will be much slower, of course).  Using the system expat 
is tricky, because the expat has to be configured the way we expect it 
to be (basically that its expat_config.h is the same as ours), and I 
don't think that's a given everywhere.

Mike