[fitsbits] start of Public Comment Period on the INHERIT convention

[Mark Calabretta]

On Tue, 23 Jun 2015 14:14:42 +0100 (BST)
Mark Taylor <m.b.taylor at bristol.ac.uk> wrote:

Hi Mark,

> The main worry I have is the possibility of INHERITed keywords
> that make a significant difference to the way that an inheriting
> HDU is processed.  For instance if a PHDU has a set of TFORMn
> keywords that are INHERITed by subsequent BINTABLE extensions
> (which themselves lack those keywords), then the file will look
> legal to a reader which is aware of INHERIT but illegal to one
> which is not.  In that context, Lucio's comment:

I believe there is a loophole in the standard that needs plugging;
it should prohibit table-specific keywords appearing in the primary
header:

  TFIELDS, TTYPEn, TBCOLn, TFORMn, TUNITn, TSCALn, TZEROn, TNULLn,
  TDISPn, TDIMn, THEAP, (and potentially, TDMINn, TDMAXn, TLMINn,
  TLMAXn), plus all of the table-specific WCS keywords.

Regards,
Mark Calabretta