Packaging PRESTO for multiple OSes?

[astrogewgaw]

Just wanted to know if anyone had tried packaging PRESTO for multiple OSes; for example, as a *.deb package for Debian-based distros, or as an *.rpm package for Fedora-based distros, etc. It would definitely be a bit of a pain, because packaging anything for multiple OSes is not easy, but it could make the installation of PRESTO easier, especially for newcomers, since all they would have do is something like:

sudo apt install presto

to get it on their system. Would it be something that people would like to see? Is it something that people tried and gave up on? I am no expert on any of this, but I do want to give this a try nevertheless.

[scottransom]

While I love this idea, I definitely don't have time to do it myself. I also worry that doing one that would likely be easy (like a .deb for Ubuntu) would only help a small subset of users (especially since installation on Ubuntu is really easy already).

I think that the best way to tackle this is likely with containerization, possibly like Docker or something Anaconda-like. There is some non-working (but likely only slightly broken) Docker-ization code in PRESTO already. And @demorest has a Conda install of PRESTO (albeit a bit out-of-date), available here: https://github.com/demorest/presto-conda I installed and tested it a couple days ago using conda install -c demorest -c conda-forge presto.

[demorest]

FWIW I'd like to get these all moved to conda-forge but there are dependencies (in particular need to do tempo first).

[astrogewgaw]

I agree that some kind of containerization would be ideal. Nevertheless, I would still like to try my hand on this, provided I get some free time 😅 . If I make any progress, I will let y'all know. I realize (as @demorest rightly points out) that one must probably package TEMPO first, so we will see how it goes 😁 !

On a side note, I am on Arch Linux right now, and installing PRESTO on it is quite easy as well, since cfitsio and fftw are available via pacman (just like Ubuntu, where you can get these libraries via apt).