[AstroPy] astropy in Debian, Scientific Linux?

[Derek Homeier]

Hi,

On 07.04.2013, at 11:50PM, Sergio Pascual <sergio.pasra at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not having precompiled packages available in Fedora/EPEL is very bad for astropy in my opinion. From a small sample of 20 Professors-Postdocs-Students in my Astrophysics Department, I can say that only those doing software development use "pip". The vast majority use "yum" in Fedora or "fink/macports" in Mac to bring in the package and continue doing Science.
> 
as a note on that, I have just created a fink package for astropy 0.2.1, and while I have
not looked at the SOFA license in detail, I could probably upload it on the package tracker
so people could at least download and build their own .debs with it.
It's a rather basic port so far simply using the included wcslib, sofa and expat; from a packaging
point of view it would probably be preferable to put those int o separate packages (and deal
with the licenses separately…)

I am also having trouble creating a .deb that would pass validation by the packing system,
since setup.py install copies byte-compiled .pyc files from the build dir into the installation dir,
and such files (which point to the wrong path after installation) are not accepted in validated
.deb packages. I have not been able to overcome this even trying to rip apart the install steps
in whatever way I found (and I am not an expert with setuptools), so if anyone has an idea how
to tell setuptools/distribute not to copy the .pyc's in the first place (no other package like numpy
or matplotblib does this apparently), I'd be very grateful.

Cheers,
						Derek