Saturday, March 29, 2014

pyAstroStack 0.2.1 - Now it might even work!

Should I say it once more? I really don't have experience on working with any programming projects this big. I seem to learn everything the hard way. Before releasing the first alpha, the biggest problems were with writing the user interface. Something I've never done properly. Everything has been my own little programs so I always could edit the source. No need for UI then...

But even that was something I just needed to work on. After 0.1.0 it came to my knowledge that the program is too difficult to install. Not pyAstroStack itself but its requirements. Some libraries I used were on Gentoo's Portage, which I use for coding and testing, but they're missing even on Ubuntu or Debian. That could be circumvented with Pip. A bigger problem was OpenCl. My debayering algorithms rely on pyOpenCl and the program is quite useless without it. On Gentoo it worked if I had just the right version of Nvidia drivers, but on Ubuntu it didn't. It was possible to hack it working, but I'd rather have it easier.

On Ubuntu 14.04 things seem to work better. I haven't tested everything yet but at least OpenCl works after installing Nvidia's proprietary drivers.

Version 0.2 doesn't have any new features. There are rewritten classes, some speed improvement, things work a lot differently under the hood... Most changes were preparing to write a graphical user interface. I've chosen PySide with QML for implementing it. Now I just have to learn how to write QML. :)

Here's a link once more to download pyAstroStack: PyAstroStack on BitBucket