Hi,
we use astropy for user scripts in a telescope control system, otherwise erfa in the CS code.
A change of Linux distribution brought us an upgrade of astropy from 5.3.3 to 7.01.
Our IERS data update strategy is to download IERS-A data regularly. So we aim for the highest precision. But if that fails (e.g. due to network access restrictions), and cached data is older than auto_max_age, then we would like to get only warnings logged by astropy.
This worked fine in the old version of astropy, with setting iers.conf.iers_degraded_accuracy = "warn", which yielded an IERSDegradedAccuracyWarning.
It seems that with the inclusion of IERS-A data in astropy (commit 2da17a6c53), this config attribute is no longer applied to cached IERS-A data, but only to the IERS data that came already with the astropy installation. Instead of printing the warnings, astropy now fails with ValueError, which we don't want.
A possible workaround would be to set a very large auto_max_age, but then we don't even get the warnings that we actually like to see.
My question is, would it be possible to add a new config attribute that applies to cached IERS-A data, e.g. iers.conf.iers_degraded_accuracy_cached? Or to apply the existing attribute iers_degraded_accuracy to all IERS data sources (installation, previous download)?
Or maybe I'm lacking imagination and one could get the old behavior back in a different way, without change in astropy?
Many thanks for any hint!
Heiko