Astronomy packages

Good morning

Among the astronomy packages I would like to mention:

  • Skychart (great planetarium software, written in … pascal)
  • Astrometry (a blind astrometric solver)

I would like to propose 2 more packages:

  • AstroImageJ - a fits viewer designed for double stars and more
  • ASTAP - a fast fits viewer and fast astrometric solver - used by many other solvers, much faster than astrometry(dotnet) and integrated with some of the largest star catalogues out there.

AstroImageJ has a GPL v3 license

Astap has MPL-2.0 license.

I would like to understand if we can package these 2 programs and what would be the next steps forward.

Thank you

Are they already packages in an RPM?
If so you can already install them.

Basically you have to do it yourself, or find someone to do it for you.
There is no central repository for package requests.

To do it yourself, you can make a Fedora Copr. People will help you, but you need to really take the lead and expect to do a lot of reading.

Possibly the easiest way would be find an existing packager who is into astronomy and work with them.

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I have looked few years ago into packaging ASTAP, but I got stuck and never got the need to try harder.

ASTAP is a Pascal program and AstroImageJ is Java, so they’re not the easiest target if you’re inexperienced as Fedora packager. But if you want to try, check the package maintainer guide. Also, check the astronomy mailing list, mostly dead, but if you’re interested in astronomy and want to package something don’t forget to chime in there.

Thank you Mattia, I was looking for some documentation on packaging. I will give it a try.