Astropy has benefited from the addition of widely tested legacy code, as well as new development, resulting in variations in stability accross sub-packages. This document summarises the current status of the Astropy sub-packages, so that users understand where they might expect changes in future, and which sub-packages they can safely use for production code.
Note that until version 1.0, even sub-packages considered Mature could undergo some user interface changes as we work to integrate the packages better. Thus, we cannot guarantee complete backward-compatibility between versions at this stage.
The classification is as follows:
Planned | |
Actively developed, be prepared for possible significant changes | |
Reasonably stable, no major changes likely | |
Mature |
The current planned and existing sub-packages are:
Sub-Package | Comments | |
---|---|---|
astropy.constants | Constants have been changed to Quantity objects in v0.2. | |
astropy.coordinates | New in v0.2 | |
astropy.cosmology | Incremental improvements since v0.1, but mostly stable API. | |
astropy.io.ascii | Originally developed as asciitable, and has maintained a stable API. | |
astropy.io.fits | Originally developed as pyfits, and retains an API consistent with the standalone version. | |
astropy.io.votable | Originally developed as vo.table, and has a stable API. | |
astropy.photometry | ||
astropy.stats | Still in development, and does not yet contain much functionality. | |
astropy.table | Incremental improvements since v0.1, but mostly stable API. | |
astropy.time | Incremental improvements since v0.1, but mostly stable API. | |
astropy.units | New in v0.2. Adapted from pnbody and integrated into Astropy. | |
astropy.utils | This sub-package contains mostly utilities destined for use in other parts of Astropy, and is not yet stable. | |
astropy.vo | ||
astropy.wcs | Originally developed as pywcs, and has a stable API for now. However, there are plans to generalize the WCS interface to accommodate non-FITS WCS transformations, and this may lead to small changes in the user interface. |