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Re: Gnuastro 0.17.81 released
From: |
Mohammad Akhlaghi |
Subject: |
Re: Gnuastro 0.17.81 released |
Date: |
Wed, 6 Jul 2022 13:29:11 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/91.11.0 |
Hi Peter,
Thanks for the complements on the manual and for doing the checks. Its
great that we haven't had any crashes so far.
About PGPLOT, as you said, the main problem is that it is not free
software (others aren't allowed to re-distribute it). So when building
WCSLIB, we intentionally recommend to add the configuration option to
disable it in WCSLIB. I personally don't use (as much as possible!),
encourage or recommend non-free software; and its also a GNU policy ;-).
That appendix on installing it from source is only there for historical
reasons (because in the early days, I was curious on running it to see
how it works; and after going through the frustration; I thought those
notes can be useful to others). But only in the appendix, and not in the
main body of the text.
DS9 and TOPCAT are in the optional dependencies from package managers,
because they are used in the 'astscript-fits-view' installed script of
Gnuastro: it will inspect the contents of the FITS file; if the first
HDU is an image, it will be opened in DS9, and if its a table, it will
be opened in TOPCAT. Both are also free software ;-).
Thanks also for the notes on Lzip. I just edited the "Quick start"
section of the book to focus more on Lzip and avoid the confusions with
Gzip:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuastro.git/commit/?id=bb8f6162f2
As described in the announcement, and in the respective parts of the
book, Lzip tarballs for software source code have a much better
compression rate than Gzip. For example for Gnuastro 0.17, the Lzip'd
tarball was 3.7MB while the Gzip'd tarball was 6.0MB (40% better
compression). Lzip also uses much more robust archival standards than
Gzip; and is a far more robust software (if you tried building it from
source, you will notice how elegantly small it is).
As a result, for alpha releases I only release '.tar.lz', but for main
releases and for historical reasons, I also put a '.tar.gz' file; but
still recommend the '.tar.lz' ;-).
Thanks again Peter for the great comments,
Cheers,
Mohammad