It is my pleasure to announce the release of PyFITS version 3.3.0. PyFITS is a
Python package for reading FITS format images and tables and manipulating their
associated data and headers. The new version can be download from PyPI at:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyfits/3.3
The latest documentation can be found at:
https://pythonhosted.org/pyfits/
This is a relatively minor release in terms of new features, and was released
today mostly to keep the PyFITS release in sync with today's release of Astropy
v0.4.
However, there are some important notices that accompany this release:
* The v3.3.x release series for PyFITS will be the *last* to support
Python 2.5, 3.1, and 3.2. PyFITS v3.4 will only support Python 2.6,
Python 2.7, and Python >= 3.3, in keeping with the Astropy project and
much of the rest of the Python community.
* PyFITS v3.3.x releases will be the last to support several APIs that have been
deprecated since v3.1. Some of the most common include Header.ascard and
Card.key. Also, deletion of non-existent header keywords (e.g.
del header['NONEXIST']) will raise a KeyError (just like a Python dict would)
rather than pass silently. Changes such as these are in order to reduce the
burden of maintaining old code, while giving users enough time to adjust their
use of that code as necessary. For a full list of API changes see the
changelog:
https://pythonhosted.org/pyfits/appendix/changelog.html#api-changes
* As is the case in Astropy, warnings for use of deprecated APIs are enabled by
default. This is mostly for the sake of developers using PyFITS. For
user-facing software that uses PyFITS internally it may be desirable to
disable these warnings. To that end a shortcut that can be called after
importing pyfits is provided:
pyfits.ignore_deprecation_warnings()
* Finally, the v3.3.x release series will be the last to include binary .exe
installers for Windows distributions. PyFITS v3.4 and above will only provide
wheel [1] distributions for Python--these are considered the new community
standard for binary distributions of Python projects.
You can contact me at <emb...@stsci.edu> with any questions or comments. Thank
you to everyone who submitted bug reports and fixes.
Erik Bray
[1] http://wheel.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
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