Re: fun with casa

[heroxbd@xxxxxxxxxx]

Dear Gijs,

Thanks. These are definitely encouraging news!

Gijs Molenaar <gijsmolenaar@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> I've been working on this last year. We (me and MeerKAT software
> people here in South Africa) had a conference call with the NRAO
> people last year, where we discussed the current (poor) state of CASA.
> I'm not sure what is the state of CASA at the moment, since as far as
> I know development mostly happens in the states and there is no public
> bug tracker, mailinglist or forum.
>
> I think what you all should know is:
>
> * They acknowledge the problems with casa and want to improve the
> state of CASA. We here in South Africa would create Debian packages,
> or at least get everything working on Debian and let it use the system
> Python (not the bundled one)
>
> * CASA forked casacore, or the other way around. That was a bad idea,
> and effort is being done to undo this. CASA specific changes are
> merged back into the google code casacore repo and casa is (going to
> be?) adjusted to work with the google code one.

Is that the upcoming casacore-2.0.0?  Quoting from their homepage:

    "There will be a new major release (2.0.0) soon containing
    significant changes."

> * CASA uses its own python and much more packages. I managed to get
> most of the stuff working with the system python, but many parts of
> the code depend on an ancient version of IPython. Only solution I see
> here is to update CASA to make it work with a more recent IPython.
>
> * The not finished work in progress results of my packaging effort can
> be found here:
>
> https://github.com/ska-sa/casacore-debian/tree/casa
> https://github.com/ska-sa/casa-debian
> https://github.com/ska-sa/gcwrap-debian
>
> I've created issues and patches for most of the problems I
> encountered, see the issues trackers of the repo's. This was all
> thrown back over the fence to NRAO, plan was that they where going to
> be evaluated and put in the tree or not. I have no idea what the
> status of that is.
>
> I'm back in South Africa now, and the idea is that I'm going to spent
> some time again on this. Probably somewhere this month I'll have a
> talk with NRAO people and MeerKAT developers here, I think it is good
> to get you people involved (if you want) and get everybody heading in
> the same direction.

I have heard people in debian-astro list talking about casa. I bet there
are interests here.  Besides, we (the airelinux developers in the Cc
list) are eager to get involved.

Please keep us updated on this collaborative effort.  It would be nice
if we could hold a video conference to talk about it.

Cheers,
Benda