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

[Peter Weilbacher]

On Fri, 19 Jun 2015, Lucio Chiappetti wrote:

> ANNOUNCEMENT:  START OF FORMAL PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD
>
> This is to announce the official start of a 3-week formal Public Comment
> Period on the incorporation of so called header inheritance (for short
> INHERIT) convention in the FITS Standard.

I have to say that I like INHERIT.

I work a lot with files with large headers from ESO instruments which
store general information of an exposure in the primary HDU which all
CCD images stored in extensions, together with specific information for
that CCD.

They use INHERIT=T to not have to duplicate all that exposure data for
each CCD. That makes these files more human-readable and at the same
time gives software a hint on how to process it.

If the proposal were changed along the lines of the EXTEND keyword, i.e.
that one should take the INHERIT keyword as advisory, I don't think one
can complain any more. Actually, I think one can also relax the
requirement that INHERIT has to be present directly after the required
ones. After all, if the extension HDU and the primary HDU are merged, it
does not really matter when this happens.

I also have to say that I find the additions to the appendix in this
proposal (and all the other ones) a bit weird. If the pointer to the
webpage with the convention is still needed, then the added text in the
standard is not good enough.

Cheers,
   Peter.
-- 
Dr Peter Weilbacher                 http://www.aip.de/People/PWeilbacher
Phone +49 331 74 99-667                       encryption key ID 7D6B4AA0
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