[Mageia-dev] Fwd: [fedora-astronomy] IRAF RPM spec files

Sat Mar 23 11:55:03 CET 2013

Forwarding to mageia-dev minus the patches which have been checked in
+the mageia repo....
+
+One thing to note about IRAF is that it is the main tool that
+professional astronomers use in data analysis, and for various
+licensing reasons which were fixed last year and code related reasons,
+it's never been source packaged for any linux distributions until now.
+
+It appears that Mageia 4 is going to have the big three professional
+astronomy tools (iraf, eso-midas, and ds9), and the RPM's for those
+packages are such that Fedora and OpenSUSE can use them to refresh
+their distributions.
+
+Among astronomers, about 70-80% use Macs and 20-30% use Linux,
+although in the actual "big iron" calculations, it's 95+% linux.
+Windows isn't a player at all.  The problem with astronomy is that
+increasingly it's going over to Macs with all of the problems of
+having a "closed and DRM'ed ecosystem" and my goal for this year and
+next is to "stop the bleeding."
+
+The reason astronomers are going over to Macs is that Macs are easy to
+use and have a nice environment which astronomers can use when not
+doing calculations, and because Macs have very good discounts for
+academic users.  The problem with Macs is that they are not "hackable"
+systems, but for day to day office use, this doesn't matter, and there
+is enough of a development environment so that you can use Macs for
+"light/middle duty" calculations.
+
+Linux works the other way.  The heavy duty calculations are all on
+unix, mainly Linux.  The trouble with linux is that they don't have
+the easy of use that Macs have.  The good news is that in order to be
+competitive with Macs, linux boxes need to only have 75% of the easy
+of use of Macs for people to use them.  The bad news is that its
+becoming increasingly hard for astronomy based linux distributions to
+have even this.  There are several linux distributions geared
+specifically toward astronomy (ESO Soft and Scientific Linux).  The
+trouble is that maintaining a distribution is too much to have
+astronomers do since most of the work doesn't involve astronomy.  This
+means that the specifically astronomy based linux distributions are
+starting to be more and more unmaintained, which is why I think it's
+necessary to have astronomers "piggy-back" off of existing
+distribution development communities.
+
+One piece of the puzzle that I think it missing are people from the
+amateur astronomy.  Amateur and professional astronomers end up in
+different communities which is bad in this situation since linux
+distributions can push professional software tools down to amateurs,
+and amateurs have a lot of technical knowledge and people-power that
+could be useful for the professional astronomy community.  I'm trying
+to look for people that have used linux to do backyard telescope
+control and image processing.
+
+The big trend in astronomy is toward "virtual observatories" and I'm
+trying to make sure that linux has a seat at the table and doesn't get
+overrun by Macs.
+
+---------- Forwarded message ----------
+From: Joseph Wang <joequant at gmail.com>
+Date: Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 6:15 PM
+Subject: Re: [fedora-astronomy] IRAF RPM spec files
+To: Sergio Pascual <sergiopr at fedoraproject.org>
+Cc: astronomy <astronomy at lists.fedoraproject.org>, admin at iraf.net,
+mageia-dev <mageia-dev at mageia.org>
+
+
+Here is the latest set up patches.  The main difference is that I
+found and fixed some fortran declarations and one very subtle but
+nasty segfault in fncache.c.  I also changed the compile so that it
+uses the system expat and readline.
+
+The individual checkins are available at
+
+https://github.com/joequant/iraf
+
+The build file is just a git diff between master and linux-build.
+
+Let me know if they help the compile....
+
+There is one extra patch that isn't used by the spec file which you
+can play with.
+
+I'm in the process of trying to get everything to work with gfortran,
+but am running into a lot of subtle memory issues.  There is IRAF code
+that creates a subsystem for allocating memory and there are a lot of
+pointer conversion issues.
+
+On my machine I got a working RPM  ----->
+
+   NOAO/IRAF PC-IRAF Revision 2.16 EXPORT Thu May 24 15:41:17 MST 2012
+      This is the EXPORT version of IRAF V2.16 supporting PC systems.
+
+
+  Welcome to IRAF.  To list the available commands, type ? or ??.  To get
+  detailed information about a command, type `help <command>'.  To run  a
+  command  or  load  a  package,  type  its name.   Type  `bye' to exit a
+  package, or `logout' to get out  of the CL.    Type `news' to find  out
+  what is new in the version of the system you are using.
+
+  Visit http://iraf.net if you have questions or to report problems.
+
+  The following commands or packages are currently defined:
+
+Initializing SAMP .... No Hub Available
+
+      dataio.     images.     lists.      obsolete.   proto.
+system.     vo.
+      dbms.       language.   noao.       plot.       softools.   utilities.
+
+vocl>
+