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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