[info-gnuastro] Gnuastro reading for beta testing

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Dear all,

GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) is finally ready for public
release. However, before officially marking the 0.1 tag and releasing
the tarball on the webpage, we are very interested in your feedback if
you are willing to try it out. Your feedback will certainly be very
useful in making the first release as good as possible and will be
gratefully acknowledged. We plan to make the official release before
the end of May.

If you are willing to try installing and using this pre-release
version of Gnuastro, please contact me privately at
address@hidden You can try out the version controlled source (which
is currently being hosted on a private repository), or a tarball,
which is ready to be installed. Gnuastro should install easily on
Unix-like operating systems (including GNU/Linux distributions and Mac
OS X), if the few requirements are present: CFITSIO, WCSLIB and GNU
Scientific Library (optionally, if you have libjpeg and Ghostscript
you can also convert FITS images to JPEG and PDF formats). See the
installation section of Gnuastro for a full explanation:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Installation.html

The most recent version of the Gnuastro manual has just been uploaded
to gnu.org and is available at the following address in various
formats. We have tried very hard to make it as comprehensive as
possible and thoroughly explain everything, so it should help you get
started with the various utilities very easily.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/

If you are interested in helping us develop Gnuastro, you are most
welcome, and we have prepared a full chapter explaining everything for
you so you can start developing very easily:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Developing.html

Based on GNU's long experience, the Gnuastro infra-structure has been
built to allow easy expansions (new utilities, new options to the
utilities and etc). We have also already started planning for the 0.2
version which will also install libraries (Task #13765). In later
versions we are hopefully planning to add wrappers those libraries so
they can be used in other languages like C++, Python or Java (Task
#13786). So there is a lot of work waiting to be done and if you are
interested, please join us.

Sincerely yours,
Mohammad