iraf.net

I'm wondering if anyone has considered putting the iraf sources under version control with some sort of a modern web interface.While there are a lot of people out there who might like a 'ground up' rewrite of IRAF, it's not going to happen anytime soon, and in the meantime it would be nice if there were some facility to share updates.Sourceforge might be a possible solution to this issue as well.Right now, there's nothing like this that I can see, and it's clearly an issue that will slow community development without it.Thanks,Tim

This has been suggested before, but I seriously doubt you'll find people in the community claiming the lack of an svn repository is what's been keeping them from developing code in the core system all these years 8-) As a practical matter though, there has been little incentive to create a public repository: releases still come from the core IRAF developers (I'm working on a patch this week in fact), over 20 years it's been extremely rare that users submit code changes/fixes (this doesn't count contributions from other major development groups back in the glory days), and at the current development effort (<<1 FTE) a 'nightly build' release doesn't make sense.That said, there are other things in the works that may push for putting IRAF in a repository of some kind. Since the web-hosting company used for this site doesn't allow svn/cvs/hg this would probably be hosted on the NOAO servers and would primarily be for read-only access. Where true community development might get interesting, and where something like a sourceforge svn service could be used, would be in a 'contrib' external package with much wider access where users could contribute scripts they've written that others might find useful (Note there is already a 'sources' forum on this site for that purpose that is largely unused).The IRAF64 project ( http://www.ir.isas.jaxa.jp/~cyamauch/iraf64/ ) maintains an svn repository but has done a lot of reorganization that will have to one day be reconciled with the core system we release. Otherwise, in the 2 1/2 years of this site the only user contributions have been some very helpful documentation corrections submitted by Jason Quinn. The source code has always been available with the system at each release, and if there's a critical fix/feature you need outside the normal release cycle we're happy to provide binaries of the update, but I think you're overestimating how useful it would be to have the most current development system. If there is a demonstrated interest in users contributing code or changes, or if I'm wrong about the development system, I'm happy to setup the framework to make things easier.Cheers,
-Mike