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

[Leo P. Singer]

> "Ole Streicher" <olebole at debian.org> writes:

> 
>> "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.

Hi Ole,

wcslib has a surprisingly long chain of dependencies, but I think that it would be really easy to backport python-astropy_1.2.1. I only had to disable python-astropy-doc because jessie's pybuild apparently does not support sphinxdoc. I haven't actually been able to try a cleanroom build yet because I don't have a good system for injecting my rebuild of python-astropy-helpers into pbuilder. Do you have any suggestions for how to do that in a way that plays nicely with gbp buildpackage?

Thanks,
Leo