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eclipse newsletter 3.4 |
Dear eclipse users,
First, I must apologize for this late release. A lot of work
has been going on since several months with the installation
of ISAAC on Paranal, and it takes time to build up a correct
eclipse release. Version 3.3 has been released internally in
ESO for the ISAAC team and all eclipse lovers in Garching,
Santiago, La Silla and Paranal, but this release was never
made public on the Net. Apologies also for that! This explains
why we are now jumping directly from 3.2 to 3.4 without going
through 3.3.
What's new in the eclipse world? First major change: all commands
have now "lost" the verbose, debug and memory options:
all of these are now set through environment variables.
I guess that most of you will have to edit your scripts to reflect
this change, but that should not be too much of a hassle. This is
mostly due to the fact that some parameters like memory handling
have to be tuned up once for all for your local machine and then
kept unchanged. It is better then to set it through an environment
variable once for all, than to modify all your scripts every time
you add more RAM or more swap space to your machine, or carry
your scripts from one machine to another.
Same thing for verbose/debug: if you use eclipse mostly
in an interactive fashion, you probably do not want to be flooded
with verbose messages, whereas people running automatic pipelines
want to have an immediate feedback on what is going on. This is
set/unset through an environment variable now.
This means that you must now configure a short script file
called .eclipse-rc in your home directory, set the
environment variables as you need, and source this file preferrably
from your .cshrc or .tcshrc or .login file. All of this is described
in the eclipse installation manual in the distribution.
Notice that if you do not set these variables, there are default
values which should work anywhere.
The memory handling scheme chosen for eclipse seems to
have had some success. Since the memory modules are distributed
independently, there are several hundred downloads registered
every month, I hope for the benefit of the image processing
community. This new setting of eclipse through environment
variables also helps making this module generic to people who
want to reuse it within their own application.
Last, this environment variable business appears as the cleanest
way to integrate eclipse in the DataFlow environment created
by DMD/ESO to handle data on the Paranal mountain. Honor to our
first and privileged customer!
About FITS handling: decision has been taken not to incorporate the
CFITSIO library in eclipse. This library is way too big for what we
need. Pixel access/conversions and keyword reads can be done from
very simple system calls that do not require the complete arsenal
handling all kinds of FITSish features. Therefore, the old eclipse
routines handling FITS features will slowly be replaced by a cleaner
and simpler code that does not try to go deep into the norm but
simply give quick access to FITS headers and data.
What in the future? The eclipse code is currently only edited by
myself, it should be opened to newcomers working on ISAAC and other
ESO infrared instruments. Expect new releases often by then.
Many thanks to everyone for your help and support.
N. Devillard
N. Devillard
Tue Apr 20 15:44:46 MET DST 1999