Re: ISIS and heasoft 6.6

On Dec 3, 2008, at 9:24 AM, John E. Davis wrote:

> Michael Nowak <mnowak_at_email.domain.hidden>> Keep in mind that essentially every 0.0.1 increment of HEASOFT, John
>> has to twiddle the make files on ISIS because the XSPEC folks have
>> changed something.  So, one usually has to wait a little bit (i.e., a
>
> Aren't the xspec models now available separately?  If so, perhaps isis
> could be distributed with a snapshot of the models, and periodically
> updated when new models are released.  It seems to me that this would
> simplify the isis build.

Yes, they are.  It was something of an experiment, at the request of  
the HEASARC users committee.  1) I do not know if they keep up with  
the bug fixes as readily as the main HEASOFT distributions (now coming  
every 2 months), 2) I haven't tried building XSPEC local models  
against them (quite a number of XSPEC local models rely on the fact  
that XSPEC will be there, and hence it's subroutines are fully  
available - part of the goal of such a separate release was to make  
builds of models that assumed this easier for others), 3) as long as  
people still want the rest of FTOOLs (and there are still so many  
necessary, mission-specific tools in there that this will be the case  
for the indefinite future), they will be building XSPEC v12 anyhow.

But, your main point is still probably valid - that small(ish) model  
library probably could be used as a static snapshot and released as a  
default with ISIS.

-Mike