PIG 13 - Gammapy dependencies and distribution

[Christoph Deil]

Hi,

In preparation of Gammapy v1.0, we have discussed and considered options concerning Gammapy dependencies and distribution.

We are looking for your feedback (by September 8), especially if you want to run Gammapy on old machines or exotic platforms.

We propose to stick to the setup we adopted last year with conda environments as the main supported distribution channel, like this:

https://docs.gammapy.org/0.13/getting-started.html#install

We propose to drop support for Macports and delete this install page:

https://docs.gammapy.org/0.13/install/macports.html

(Gammapy wasn’t updated in Macports for over a year and no-one complained, looks like all Gammapy users changed to conda)

We also propose to to require Python 3.6, Numpy 1.16 and Astropy 3.2 starting with Gammapy v0.14 (and then also for v1.0).

This means that installing the latest Gammapy on old machines with the system Python that has version 3.5 won't work anymore.

Most users would still have the option to install and use conda on those machines, that should work 5-10 years back on Linux, Mac and Windows, depending on the operating system.

The full proposal is here: "PIG 13 - Gammapy dependencies and distribution"

https://github.com/gammapy/gammapy/blob/1536061257f60b56e6db95c412ec62bd461e9232/docs/development/pigs/pig-013.rst

The deadline for comments is September 8.

Comments are welcome via replies here on the mailing list, or on Gammapy Slack, or on Github at https://github.com/gammapy/gammapy/pull/2218.

We’re happy to help with installation questions any time, and we can change the proposal and keep support for older versions if needed.

Christoph, Axel, Régis & Brigitta