idlutils

A collection of IDL functions and routines used by a variety of SDSS software.

Should I be using the SVN version instead?

Until the end of SDSS-IV idlutils is maintained as a SVN repository and a GitHub repo (this one). SVN development happens as v5_x, while Git development uses the 6.x series. The SVN trunk and the GitHub master branches will not synced until the end of SDSS-IV. v5 tags are synced from SVN to GitHub every now and then. The 6.0.0 tag introduces breaking changes (see below).

So, what version should you be using? If you're developing SDSS-IV software (e.g., mangadrp, or the apogee pipeline), you probably want to keep using the v5 branch and do your changes in SVN. If you're developing for SDSS-V you should be using the 6.x tags and develop against the GitHub repository.

External libraries

Version 6.x does not ship with the Goddard and Coyote libraries but idlutils still depends on them. You need to make sure that they are available in your IDL_PATH. Alternatively, you can use sdss_install to checkout a copy of idlutils while also installing Coyote and the Goddard libraries as modules.

Versioning

Version 6.0.0 is the first one using X.Y.Z. instead of the previous vX_Y_Z syntax. If your product does idlutils version parsing you may need to update your code to handle both types of version string.

We use bumpversion to set the current version of idlutils. This replaces the previous system that used SVN variable substitution, which was deprecated with the migration to GitHub.

To install bumpversion run

pip install bumpversion

If, for example, the current version is 6.1.1 and you want to updte the minor version to 6.2.0 do bumpversion minor which will set the version to 6.2.0dev. You can also modify the major or patch sections of the version. When you're ready to tag the product, run bumpversion release to remove the dev suffix. DO NOT MODIFY FILE VERSIONS DIRECTLY. For more information, read this.

An alternative to bumpversion, do the following:

• Edit the version variable in the bin/idlutils_version file, with the new version number
• Add or update the RELEASE_NOTES with a new section for the version number, with release date
• Commit the changes
• In a terminal, run git tag [version], where [version] is the new version number
• Run git push origin [version]
• Update the version number to next dev version and commit the change