[fitsbits] Start of the FITS Region File Public Comment Period

[Thierry Forveille]

I agree with Lucio that this convention poses a policy/strategy
problem: all conventions we have examined to date either solved
a general problem for good (to quasi-unanimous satisfaction),
or (mostly) were clearly of historical or very specialized
interest. Here we instead have something which attacks
a problem of very broad interest for the first time, but
(quite naturally) has not yet converged to a generally
acceptable solution.

My strong preference would be for a small working group to start
work on a future standard for the general problem of specifying
regions within FITS (no, I am not volunteering ;-)), but I don't
know what to do with the existing convention in the mean time.
On the one hand such data files might be out in the wild and
documenting them can only be a good thing, but on the other
hand officializing the convention would spread usage of what
most likely will be an interim stage of the actual standard.

-- 
Thierry Forveille
Laboratoire d'Astrophysique (UMR 5571 CNRS)
Observatoire de Grenoble / U. Joseph Fourier
BP 53  F-38041 Grenoble Cedex 9 (France)

http://laog.obs.ujf-grenoble.fr/~forveille
mailto:Thierry.Forveille at obs.ujf-grenoble.fr
Phone / Fax: +33 (0)4 76.51.42.15 / +33 (0)4 76.44.88.21