[daip] Debian package of AIPS

[Justin Pryzby]

Greetings,

I am creating a package of AIPS for Debian GNU/Linux.  The goal is
that AIPS can be easily installed by any technical person with
"aptitude install aips".  I've packaged other astronomy software too: 
iraf,saods9,eclipse,sextractor,x11iraf,wcstools, plus many external
IRAF tasks.

I will be working with a couple local radio astronomers, but I'm not
presently familiar with AIPS.  I've some questions regarding how the
package should act.

Does AIPS *require* X11?  (Really, "Should aips be present in a
command-line application menu?").

Can I remove the SUBLIB files from the runtime environment?  That
could shave another 10MB. 

	 1.3M /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/AIPSUB/SUBLIB
	 890K /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/APLLINUX/SUBLIB
	 2.2M /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/APLNOT/SUBLIB
	 963K /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/APLOOP/SUBLIB
	 1.5M /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/APLSUB/SUBLIB
	 551K /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/QNOT/SUBLIB
	 740K /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/QOOP/SUBLIB
	 265K /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/QPSAP/SUBLIB
	  74K /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/QSUB/SUBLIB
	  44K /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/YNOT/SUBLIB
	 127K /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/YSS/SUBLIB
	 480K /usr/lib/aips/31DEC04/LINUX/LIBR/YSUB/SUBLIB

Does AIPS define its own programming language (like IRAF's SPP)?

What, if any, AIPS datafiles are sharable across all hosts (of any
architecture/endianness)?  I have set up the compilation such that
AIPS root is /usr/lib/aips/; I would like to move as much as possible
to /usr/share/aips, creating the appropriate symlinks.  I have already
moved ./TEXT/ there; can you confirm that this is okay?

Can AIPS use shared libraries (easily)?  I tried to do this with my
IRAF package, but IRAF does some crazy stuff which I don't understand,
so it didn't work.  Seems to me like I should just be able to change
all compile time linking to .a files to .so files.  And change the
compilation of the .so files, and install them to /usr/lib/aips/.
(Not so with iraf).

I will make my package available shortly.  One problem is the size.
If shared libraries are a possiblity, I will implement that first.

Thanks,
-- 
Justin
aptitude install task-iraf saods9 eclipse sextractor x11iraf wcstools
http://www.justinpryzby.com/debian/
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