starlink-pyhds 0.2

Python interface to the Starlink HDS library

starlink.hds is a Python extension of the C-based Starlink HDS library, allowing reading and writing of Starlink HDS format files inside Python. It can read and write version 4 and version 5 (HDF5 based) HDSfiles. It does not require the Starlink software suite to be installed on your system. It also requires numpy, and it requires a c compiler to built. It will build the HDF5 library itself and does not require a separate installation of that.

As the build procedure uses starlink-generated configure scripts to build the hds-v4 and hds-v5 libraries, it may unfortunately require that gfortran or similar is present on the build machine. However, the fortran libraries are not used here.

This was adapted from the starlink.hds packaged shipped inside starlink-pyndf: https://github.com/timj/starlink-pyndf The primary difference is that this package does not require a separate Starlink installation as it directly builds the C HDS library (and dependencies), and it does not include any NDF specific access.

For more information on HDS see: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/docs/sun92.htx/sun92.html or for information on Starlink itself see http://starlink.eao.hawaii.edu/starlink

Installation

It is installed via.

python setup.py install

or

python setup.py install –prefix=<your specific installation directory>

Updating library versions (for maintainers)

If it necessary to update the libraries, you should do a ‘make dist’ in a configured Starlink install, copying the tarball into here, and then un-tarring the resulting distribution into this repo. Add the files to git, and check if there are any missing files that were not included in the dist tar ball. The normal Starlink build procedure does not use the ‘make dist’ step, so it is fairly common for new header files and similar to be missing. Please update the upstream starlink Makefile.am as appropriate to fix it.