Still experimental?

[grburgess]

Is this package still considered experimental? I would really like to switch astromodels over to this and have a common place to work on this as xspec continues to be a huge technical debt.

[DougBurke]

I have had absolutely no-one express any interest,so I have spent no time on it. I'm also out until September.

[grburgess]

No worries. I can have a look and see if I can help support as well.

[DougBurke]

I've just bumped the code so that it builds with XSPEC 12.12.1. Unfortunately, for "reasons", I've had to drop support for XSPEC 12.12.0 (I'd like it to be version agnostic but that is not easy).

[DougBurke]

I also haven't had time to evaluate whether this is something we would be able to use in Sherpa, but to be honest we are some way away from being robust enough to be able to think about this!

[grburgess]

:) yes. We had an issue where someone decided to put our pip version on conda-forge which broke the conda part because of channel priority and the xspec libraries get lost. So I'm looking for a better way. It's semi fixed now... but it's no fun. I'm half way inspired to just go through every model and turn them into interpolation tables and upload that somewhere for people to use.

[DougBurke]

I've updated this to work with XSPEC 12.13.1 (not that it really needed any changes, but the tests needed a tweak).

[DougBurke]

Some thoughts on what I'd want to remove the experimental label:

• Sherpa needs to be able to send (elo, ehi) rather than energies
• Sherpa needs to be able to send "Angstroms" (in an annoying magical way)
• Sherpa has a Python module containing "model" classes which is currently hard-coded; at the moment we can't create this automatically because (an incomplete list)
  • we don't have a short description for each parameter
  • we have no way to link from a model to the associated XSPEC help page: e.g. mapping from bvapec to https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/xanadu/xspec/manual/XSmodelBapec.html
  • I'd like to link associated models (the See Also section) for the documentation which there's no information about in the model.dat file

and

• there has to be interest from the community
  • that is, people trying this out to see if it builds, runs, and does what they need [this has been added since the original post]