[Debian-astro-maintainers] backport python-astropy for jessie?

[Ole Streicher]

Hi Leo,

"Leo P. Singer" <leo.singer at ligo.org> writes:
> Has anyone tried backporting python-astropy for jessie? Does anyone
> know what the major issues would be? The Debian-based machines in the
> LIGO computing clusters run jessie, and we are starting to use astropy
> more and more in our pipelines, and it would be nice to have an
> up-to-date version easily available.

I guess the major problem is wcslib, which is 4.24 in Jessie. Although
astropy upstream claims to work with this version, some it fails to
build (#844525).

Backporting wcslib-5.X depends on giza (a pgplot replacement) as build
dependency in order to include libpgsbox into Debian main; so giza needs
to be backported as well. That should be not a problem; so if you want
to take the effort, please go ahead.

Generally, we still don't have a good backport strategy; it would be
nice to keep our packages up-to-date in the stable release(s). It may be
worth to look into Neurodebian's efforts here (they also include Ubuntu)
to keep the efforts well-structured and maintainable.

Best regards

Ole