Forwarding to mageia-dev minus the patches which have been checked in the mageia repo....
One thing to note about IRAF is that it is the main tool that professional astronomers use in data analysis, and for various licensing reasons which were fixed last year and code related reasons, it's never been source packaged for any linux distributions until now. It appears that Mageia 4 is going to have the big three professional astronomy tools (iraf, eso-midas, and ds9), and the RPM's for those packages are such that Fedora and OpenSUSE can use them to refresh their distributions. Among astronomers, about 70-80% use Macs and 20-30% use Linux, although in the actual "big iron" calculations, it's 95+% linux. Windows isn't a player at all. The problem with astronomy is that increasingly it's going over to Macs with all of the problems of having a "closed and DRM'ed ecosystem" and my goal for this year and next is to "stop the bleeding." The reason astronomers are going over to Macs is that Macs are easy to use and have a nice environment which astronomers can use when not doing calculations, and because Macs have very good discounts for academic users. The problem with Macs is that they are not "hackable" systems, but for day to day office use, this doesn't matter, and there is enough of a development environment so that you can use Macs for "light/middle duty" calculations. Linux works the other way. The heavy duty calculations are all on unix, mainly Linux. The trouble with linux is that they don't have the easy of use that Macs have. The good news is that in order to be competitive with Macs, linux boxes need to only have 75% of the easy of use of Macs for people to use them. The bad news is that its becoming increasingly hard for astronomy based linux distributions to have even this. There are several linux distributions geared specifically toward astronomy (ESO Soft and Scientific Linux). The trouble is that maintaining a distribution is too much to have astronomers do since most of the work doesn't involve astronomy. This means that the specifically astronomy based linux distributions are starting to be more and more unmaintained, which is why I think it's necessary to have astronomers "piggy-back" off of existing distribution development communities. One piece of the puzzle that I think it missing are people from the amateur astronomy. Amateur and professional astronomers end up in different communities which is bad in this situation since linux distributions can push professional software tools down to amateurs, and amateurs have a lot of technical knowledge and people-power that could be useful for the professional astronomy community. I'm trying to look for people that have used linux to do backyard telescope control and image processing. The big trend in astronomy is toward "virtual observatories" and I'm trying to make sure that linux has a seat at the table and doesn't get overrun by Macs. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Joseph Wang <joequ...@gmail.com> Date: Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 6:15 PM Subject: Re: [fedora-astronomy] IRAF RPM spec files To: Sergio Pascual <sergi...@fedoraproject.org> Cc: astronomy <astron...@lists.fedoraproject.org>, ad...@iraf.net, mageia-dev <mageia-dev@mageia.org> Here is the latest set up patches. The main difference is that I found and fixed some fortran declarations and one very subtle but nasty segfault in fncache.c. I also changed the compile so that it uses the system expat and readline. The individual checkins are available at https://github.com/joequant/iraf The build file is just a git diff between master and linux-build. Let me know if they help the compile.... There is one extra patch that isn't used by the spec file which you can play with. I'm in the process of trying to get everything to work with gfortran, but am running into a lot of subtle memory issues. There is IRAF code that creates a subsystem for allocating memory and there are a lot of pointer conversion issues. On my machine I got a working RPM -----> NOAO/IRAF PC-IRAF Revision 2.16 EXPORT Thu May 24 15:41:17 MST 2012 This is the EXPORT version of IRAF V2.16 supporting PC systems. Welcome to IRAF. To list the available commands, type ? or ??. To get detailed information about a command, type `help <command>'. To run a command or load a package, type its name. Type `bye' to exit a package, or `logout' to get out of the CL. Type `news' to find out what is new in the version of the system you are using. Visit http://iraf.net if you have questions or to report problems. The following commands or packages are currently defined: Initializing SAMP .... No Hub Available dataio. images. lists. obsolete. proto. system. vo. dbms. language. noao. plot. softools. utilities. vocl>
