[Python-modules-team] Bug#844087: Please consider removing pyfits

[Ole Streicher]

Hi Aurelien,


On 22.11.2016 22:12, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> On 2016-11-12 11:40, Ole Streicher wrote:
>> is however valid for pyfits, which also will not see any upstream love
>> anymore.
> Note that pyfits has seen an upload in 2016, so it got upstream love
> recently, and there is a newer version than the one from Jessie in the
> archive. That said it was clearly the last version.


Sure, however the major reason for my proposal is that upstream itself
expressed that one should switch. And he thinks about releasing a
really-last version that just imports astropy.io.fits.

>> IMO the release of Stretch is a good opportunity to force the users into
>> the use of astropy, especially as it is as easy as replacing
>>
>>     import pyfits
>>
>> by
>>
>>     import astropy.io.fits as pyfits
> That's not fully correct. That's true for simple programs, that said
> astropy.io.fits has removed or deprecated some functions, so it doesn't
> work in the most complex cases.

Do you have an example here? From my experience, already the recent
versions have some incompatibilities. These incompatibilites lead to a
non-working pywcs, and this is the occasion for me to think about the
pywcs removal. For old code, you just can't use pyfits anymore;

     header.update(key, value=v,  comment=c)

will not work.

> My plan has always been to remove pyfits from the archive after the
> release of Stretch. I don't see the point of doing that earlier.

I am afraid that the user will migrate to the last pyfits release
instead of astropy, even if the effort is the same. And stay in the dead
end.

Best regards

Ole