Re: [ITP] astrometry.net-0.38-1

[Charles Wilson <cygwin@cwilson.fastmail.fm>]

On 11/7/2011 11:17 AM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> I've been trying not to offer an opinion here but it isn't clear to me
> why so many people voted +1 for this package.  It seems like we're
> adding a huge package

Meh, if you exclude the star catalogs (and I think we should; and the OP 
has agreed to avoid), then bin+src weighs in at 25MB (65MB 
uncompressed), which is pretty large but not unheard of.

Most of that is because it has a ton of exe's, and all but one are 
linked statically to various support libraries.  (Oddly all of those 
libs get dumped together into the DLL, and that dll is used by only one 
client. But, conceivably, the other exes could also link to that dll, 
for a big win: from 45MB uncompressed to approx 2.5MB, based on my 
seat-of-pants calculation).

> to the distribution just to help out a very
> miniscule user base.

Meh, without casting aspersions, I doubt the user base of our various 
specialized math tools -- like singular, octave, fftw3, qhull, etc -- 
are very large in absolute terms.  But...we have maintainers, they 
volunteered and contributed, so here we are.  If they go AWOL, then the 
package gets slapped with _obsolete.

Same deal here.

> Do we really need this package in the Cygwin
> distribution?

Well, not as such, no.  We don't really NEED very much of what's 
currently part of the distro -- but that's never been the justification 
for package acceptance.  Do we "need" fortune or robots?

I think it's kinda cool for cygwin be one of the first (not THE first; 
it's already in BSD ports IIUC) to provide these tools, so that's why I 
voted +1.

However, you're still (one of the) benevolent(?) dictators-for-life. 
Are you exercising a veto?  If so, we can teach the OP how to set up an 
add-on setup.exe repository, like cygwin-ports, which he can host over 
at astronomytortilla or whatever -- so it's not a "disaster" if you are 
vetoing.

--
Chuck