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From: Jack Renton Uteg <jruteg@protonmail.com>
Newsgroups: sci.astro
Subject: CIAO/Chandra Rant
Date: Thu, 08 Aug 2024 00:07:32 -0400
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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This is just a short rant.
CIAO (for those who don't know) is the software for Chandra analysis
(Chandra Interactive Analysis of Observations; CIAO). My research team
does X-Ray analysis, so we work with software like HEASoft and XMM-SAS,
which, while having some pain points (XMM-SAS doesn't have a source
distribution), is mostly reasonable/fine.
HOWEVER, CIAO, for *some unfathomable reason*, is distributed as a VENV
on Conda. That doesn't sound too bad, you say. People use VENVs all the
time for Python software.
Sure.
BUT IT'S MOSTLY NOT PYTHON!!!
A large portion of it is Fortran and C/C++. They *got rid* of the
source-code distribution with the latest release, which just kind of
sucks. I had to re-write my toolchain to use the HEASoft tool extractor
instead of the (much easier to use) tool CIAO dmcopy, because I'm not
running a VENV all the time just to run my other software
(most of which is just POSIX-compliant sh scripts) plus HEASoft. It's a
stupid decision and things were *just fine* when they had the source
code distribution. I've considred going through the history of the CIAO
Google Drive just to get at the previous version's source code, so I can
compile that for my laptop/our team's server (which, because budget reasons is
a 2012 iMac sitting in my office) so we can use CIAO in case we need
it. It's just kinda gross and I wish they'd've stuck with the source
code distribution.
Rant over.