NOAO still doesn’t get it
July 20th, 2005 by Marcos
The official announcement on changes to IRAF support has itself undergone a few changes since I made my original post. Here’s are some exceprts that seem new to me:
We are moving towards an open source model (although IRAF sources have always been freely available), which relies more on community efforts than in the past. To do this we will establish a web site providing forums for people to ask AND ANSWER questions, and post announcements, as well as searchable access to the large archive of email from our help desk and an updated FAQ facility. We hope to now make it more attractive for users to contribute bug fixes and enhancements, and we will be relying on the participation of those users in maintaining support for the user community.
I’ve probably done my fair share of contributing support to the IRAF community as a whole, and the idea that IRAF users help each other out is not a bad one. But bug fixes? I have doubts there are any IRAF users out there who can go into the IRAF source code and fix bugs. I could be wrong, but I know I’m useless when it goes beyond basic troubleshooting. People email me as it is, and often I can help out, but sometimes I have to refer them to the IRAF help desk… which now will be an IRAF message board in which qusetions may or may not be answered by NOAO staff. I still would like to know how much time it’s taking at NOAO to answer the email at iraf@noao.edu.
More from the announcement:
A traditional mission of the IRAF project was to provide exportable data reduction tools for NOAO data. These were written so that they could also be used with data from other observatories. The high citation rate for IRAF and the wide use of this software in the community illustrates the great success of IRAF for providing general data reduction tools for astronomers, students, and amateurs on a variety of data. While this mission is being phased out, there will still be occasional developments when they are needed for other aspects of our program.
Am I wrong or should NOAO respond to the needs of the community rather than dictate to us what should be done? The wide use of IRAF is an indication of its importance for astronomy, and that it should not be “phased out” in any matter. Especially since NOAO has offered no replacement or transition concept for IRAF. IRAF is still the primary optical/IR data reduction tool… what exactly are people supposed to use if IRAF was to some day wither away?
Those of us out there who use IRAF need to continue to express to NOAO our strong desire that IRAF support continue, and that NOAO decisions to outsource support, and diminish IRAF’s important are misguided and should be reversed. The last thing I think any IRAF user should do is be silent or be resigned to these changes. Let your opinions be heard and maybe we can change some minds.
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