casa-core

I've recently tried to build casa-core (http://casacore.googlecode.com) and found that it is surprisingly easy to build on my laptop system (Ubuntu/8.10 32bit). In fact, the only configuration item that required any fiddling was the build of the WCS library. The main gripe is excessively long compilation time.

In order to make management of the casa-core source more flexible, I used the bazaar version control system (http://bazaar-vcs.org/) and the bzr-svn plugin to check-out the casa-core source code. This allows some significant advantages compared to plain SVN :

* Access to full history information without connection to the
internet

* Ability to make local branches

* Ability to layer local changes on top of the revisions contained in
the SVN

If you want to know more, feel free to write to me...

We will be using casa-core to, at the very least, access Measurement Set data produced by ALMA.