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eclipse latest new features |
From version 4.1 to version 4.2
-----> eclipse-main
FITS separation
---------------
The eclipse main library has been through surgery to extract
all FITS-related functionalities into a stand-alone library
that can be used independently from eclipse. This new library
is called 'qfits' and has already reached version 4.1
(version number is independent from eclipse). eclipse users
will not notice it, because qfits is always included in the
eclipse-main tar file and compiled together with the rest of
the library.
For developpers, this means a change in the FITS API, for all
functions are now prefixed with 'qfits_'. Pixel loading has
been made more generic and may be a little slower than in the
previous versions. Notice that some assembly has found its
way into eclipse: on x86-based systems, swap routines are
now hardcoded in assembly language.
In the future, the qfits library should stabilize at some
point and stay frozen unless there are major changes in the
FITS format or new file types we want to support. These
changes should be independent from eclipse.
Build system
------------
The eclipse build system is the part that identifies your
platform and selects the appropriate compilation flags for
optimal performance. This system has been extended to support
more platforms, more compile options, and should make our
life easier for portability issues.
eclipse now compiles and runs fine on Darwin systems
(BSD-like), which opens the door to the new Mac OS X
platform.
Documentation
-------------
An aging version of the "eclipse developer's guide" has been
phased out from the distribution. From a recent survey, it
appears that nobody outside ESO is using eclipse's C API for
development, so this document was mostly unused. If the need
ever appears again for this document, one would have to be
produced.
Buffer overflows
----------------
A number of possible buffer overflows have been removed from
the core library, which does not mean that there are none
left. Buffer overflows cause core-dumps at best, security
holes at worst. Again: it is a terrible idea to install
eclipse with suid root or any kind of high privilege. While
this library has received great care about bugs of all kinds,
security issues have not been tackled as e.g. system daemons.
Bug corrections
---------------
Lots of bugs have been fixed in the core libraries. They
all have been already released in 4.1.x releases as they have
been corrected, though.
-----> eclipse-isaac
General changes:
- All QC products have been corrected to support the latest
QC1 requirements from Paranal.
Spectroscopy:
- isaacp lw_spflat: switched default fit order from 4 to 3,
which changes the fit polynomial order from 3 to 2.
Imaging:
- A new recipe has been added and validated for filtering of
the odd-even effect on ISAAC frames. Check out the
'oddeven' recipe in isaacp.
- The two dark recipes (dark-ron and dark-avg) have been
merged into a single recipe. Some warnings have been added
in the output PAF file to stress the fact that measurements
are done following a Monte-Carlo methods, so results will
slightly vary from one execution to another.
Imaging jitter:
- An additional QC parameter is now produced by the jitter
recipe, called QC.IQ (for Image Quality). This parameter
tries to estimate the image quality from all objects that
look like stars in the final product.
This parameter has been added to the ISAAC QC dictionary,
and will now be exported to the QC1 log with other QC1
parameters.
- Additional tests have been introduced to allow 'jitter' to
work with non-ISAAC frames.
-----> eclipse-conica
Development of the CONICA pipeline is going on. In its
current state, the pipeline is only meant to be used by
people working with the pipeline team. No public
documentation has been released yet.
-----> eclipse-python
Build procedure
---------------
The eclipse-python build procedure is now based on the
distutils module which requires Python 2.0 or later,
or if you are still running Python 1.5.2, you will need to
download and install the distutils module (found on
www.python.org).
Unit tests
----------
The eclipse-python module now features unit tests, written
using the unit testing environment provided by Python. This
investment has already paid off by finding a number of very
tricky bugs in the core libraries.
The script previously written to test various eclipse-python
capabilities will remain as an example of what can be done
with this module.
-----> eclipse-adonis
No change.
-----> eclipse-wfi
No change.
-----> eclipse-lua
No change.
See all changes for eclipse versions since 1.2