[fitsbits] Start of the 'INHERIT' Public Comment Period

[Archie Warnock]

Hi all!  Yes - I'm still lurking around.

William Pence <pence at milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote in 
news:mailman.11.1175867088.4349.fitsbits at listmgr.cv.nrao.edu:
 
> Some might suggest that with the abundance of low cost disk space that 
> is now available, the inherit convention is trying to fix a 
> non-problem.  The amount of diskspace that is saved by not duplicating 
> the keywords in every extension is rather insignificant in most cases 
> and doesn't warrant the extra software complexity in supporting the 

No, but avoiding potential errors by not duplicating text strings is a 
worthy effort, as we learned long ago from relational database theory.

> inherit convention..  There are no doubt some pathological cases where 
> the size of the headers could dominate the size of the whole file, but 
> in those cases there may be alternate ways to pack the data more 
> efficiently (e.g. pack the separate image extension data into vectors 
> in rows of a single binary table extension).  

In current practice or not, I think the philosophy of "it's better to 
seek forgiveness than permission" is dangerous in this context.  If a 
convention breaks FITS, I believe it should be considered a private 
agreement and not part of the FITS standard.  That doesn't mean it can't 
be used in practice - just that it's not FITS.

-- 
Archie

-- Archie Warnock                         warnock at awcubed dot com
-- A/WWW Enterprises                          www.awcubed.com
--       As a matter of fact, I _do_ speak for my employer.