Update SOFA?

[tammojan]

Under Measures, the fortran code of SOFA (standards of fundamental astronomy) is cloned. It seems that this code stems from 2008, while at the SOFA website http://www.iausofa.org/ , several new releases are available, possibly containing bugfixes etc. Should these be incorporated into casacore?

[tammojan]

Paraphrasing a mail from Wim Brouw:

The casacore measures existed before SOFA. SOFA is included to test against. It should be updated because of new IAU and IUGI definitions.
Problems could occur with long baselines (Earth tides), but you should use CALC or something before observing. Sky conversions are ok.

As I understand it, sofa is only necessary when tests are built (only the Measures/test/testtIAU2000.cc uses it), so it could be an optional external dependency. The current 120 sofa files inside casacore are not maintained nor updated, so I suggest moving sofa out of casacore.

Note: the class SofaTest is as part of the measures library. But I doubt it is used outside the testIAU2000 test.

[twillis449]

Hi @tammojan

Which SOFA library is to be used? There are both FORTRAN and C Versions available from the IAU website.

Actually, at the moment, if I comment out line 237 of the top-level CMakeLists.txt file, SOFA does not seem to be used anywhere and the build of casacore goes to completion. (As you point out in your #105 issue SOFA is only used in one Measures test program.)

Is there a more elegant way to tell cmake not to use SOAFA? Commenting out a line of the top-level CMakeLists.txt file does not seem that elegant!

[tammojan]

Hi @twillis449. Actually you shouldn't need sofa if you don't need the test. You should not have to comment out a line in CMakeLists. If you do not have sofa, cmake will detect that and disable this specific test. I think that's quite elegant, but perhaps you have run into trouble?

If you do want to run the sofa test and are willing to install sofa just for that, have a look at the file .travis.yml in the root of casacore. That is what the automated tests do to install sofa.

[twillis449]

It looks like my bad - sorry. I've been trying to get casacore / casarest/ and python-casacore installed in my area on the Cambridge University HPC computer. I have to create special scripts that basically 'surround' the cmake-based build and I have been messing around all morning. Indeed based on your previous message I uncommented line 237 of the CMakelist.txt file and have just done a re-build of casacore 2.0.3 using my current build script and yes the absence of SOFA is handled just fine. :)