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Report of the IRAF Users Committee Meeting 1993 (1Mar94)

The IRAF Users' Committee held their annual meeting at NOAO on Friday 3
December 1993.  Committee members are listed below along with their
e-mail addresses.  IRAF users should feel free to contact any one of us
should they wish to raise any issues concerning IRAF, though of course
specific questions should be addressed to the IRAF staff at NOAO.

Committee Members:
     Belinda Wilkes, Chair (SAO)
           belinda@cfa.harvard.edu
     Carol Christian (EUVE)
           carolc@soc1.sol.berkeley.edu
     Peter Eisenhardt (absent) (JPL)
           prme@kromos.jpl.nasa.gov
     Craig Foltz (Steward Obs.)
           cfoltz@as.arizona.edu
     Bill Oegerle (STScI)
           oegerle@stsci.edu
     Jeff Pier (USNO)
           jrp@nofs.navy.mil

Carol Christian, Craig Foltz and Bill Oegerle are rotating off the
committee this year.  Any users who would like to serve (the normal
term is three years) should contact Belinda Wilkes at the e-mail
address given above.

                                Report

1)  The committee was very impressed with the new X support shown in demos,
    a great deal of progress has been made and it will make IRAF much more
    user-friendly and fun to use.  We recommend that an early deadline be
    set for the release of 2.10.3 (in the first quarter of 1994).  The
    further development of GUIs for existing tasks should be considered
    a second priority to providing the GUI tools (i.e. xgterm, ximtool) to
    the community who have been awaiting them for well over a year.

2)  We are very impressed with the increased level of use of IRAF worldwide.
    The IRAF group is currently critically staffed.  It has the highest
    number of users of any project at NOAO and its level of support should
    reflect its great importance to the astronomical community.  It is
    essential that the funding for the IRAF group should be maintained at
    least at the current level and we strongly recommend that this level
    be increased.  This increase may take the form of a direct increase of
    funding to allow new hires or an increase in the level of support at NOAO
    from outside the core IRAF group.

    As an illustration of the level of outside user support, the IRAF group
    answers 7-10 messages per day.  While some of these questions are trivial
    and take only minutes to answer, the more complex questions may require
    several days and the input of a number of different people.  As is the
    case for any large and successful software project, user support is an
    essential component of the work. The efficient handling of user support
    is a testimony to the dedication of the IRAF group.  However we are
    very concerned about the extent to which this takes valuable time and
    resources away from the development due to the small number of people
    involved.  This is one of the main reasons for our recommendation of
    an increase in funding and support for IRAF at NOAO.

3)   We strongly urge that the IRAF Beginner's Guide, which has been
     available in draft form to a limited distribution for over a year, be
     generally released.  This document is extremely useful even in its
     current, preliminary state, and should be available for those users
     who need it most, ie. those who are new to IRAF and do not know how
     to get it except by official means.

4)   Some members of the IRAF team have concentrated during the past two
     years on the development of the user interface including GUIs.  This
     has been an essential priority given the stage of IRAF development and
     the current status of the technology.  However, while we support and
     are excited about the development of GUIs for all scientific tasks,
     we recommend that after the release of 2.10.3, the scientific priorities
     (new tasks, enhancements to old ones, see 12) should once again be
     brought to the fore and move along in parallel to the technical
     developments.

5)   The IRAF Mail Network should move forward asap after the release of
     2.10.3.  Its availability will solve many of the current problems in
     communication with users and also help lighten the daily load of the IRAF
     support group at NOAO as users begin to answer one another's questions.
     We note that it needs to be well-publicized amongst the whole IRAF User
     community and easily available to ALL users so that those at small
     institutions should have access as well as those at large.

6)   We were very pleased with the description of the planned cookbooks
     and look forward to seeing them in the near future.  We would
     particularly like to emphasize the importance of the echelle cookbook.

7)   We are concerned about Open IRAF.  This is something new which does
     not appear to be directly serving the current user community.  The
     drive appears to come mostly from the space community (EUVE, AXAF).
     While we understand the need for IRAF to move forward with these
     current and future missions in mind, we strongly recommend that NASA
     funding from the projects concerned be utilized for this major
     development.

8)   We were very impressed with the tutorials described by Jeannette.
     We would like to encourage their distribution and the writing of more.
     They will be very useful both to new users and those learning new tasks.
                                                                                                             More General Comments

9)   We are very pleased with the appointment of George Jacoby to oversee
     the IRAF software group and already are seeing the results of his
     interest and efforts.

10)  We want to emphasize the need to make things (software and
     documentation) available as soon as it is usable.  For example the
     Beginner's Guide (mentioned above) was already in draft form last year
     and was already very useful and filled an important gap at that time.
     It should have been made available then rather than now and should be
     put in the proper doc directory NOW.  This is also true of xgterm and
     ximtool.  No new IRAF releases were made this year.  We strongly
     recommend that the IRAF group move towards more, smaller releases
     (patches?) at shorter intervals (6 months ~ 1 year) so that newly
     developed software or bug fixes are made available to the users in
     a timely manner.

11)  There needs to be documentation of the algorithms used in the software.
     In general such details are not included in the help files so that
     user's have to contact IRAF staff for more information.  A particular
     example of this is the multispec format files, the contents of which
     are briefly documented in one obscure place but the details of how eg.
     the noise is computed are not mentioned anywhere.  For a scientist to
     be able to use this noise spectrum, s/he needs to know how it was derived.

12)  Scientific Priorities: The committee finds it very hard to make
     scientific priorities without any information on the size of any job
     or the trade-offs involved.  This aside, we would like to emphasize
     the importance of the following topics:

     Scientific Priorities:

     Lists of changes to task parameters provided with releases
     Error propagation
     Noise modelling
     Pixel masks
     Mosaicing of registered images

13)  Ximtool should include the best features of both imtool and SAOimage.
     Based on the demo of the Alpha test version, it appears that many
     capabilities (such as the zoom windows) are not implemented yet and
     we must await the Beta test version to see these.  We recommend that
     progress toward that enhanced version be an extremely high priority.

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