Current status of sub-packagesΒΆ

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 dev Constants have been changed to Quantity objects in v0.2.
astropy.coordinates dev New in v0.2
astropy.cosmology stable Incremental improvements since v0.1, but mostly stable API.
astropy.io.ascii mature Originally developed as asciitable, and has maintained a stable API.
astropy.io.fits mature Originally developed as pyfits, and retains an API consistent with the standalone version.
astropy.io.votable mature Originally developed as vo.table, and has a stable API.
astropy.photometry planned  
astropy.stats dev Still in development, and does not yet contain much functionality.
astropy.table stable Incremental improvements since v0.1, but mostly stable API.
astropy.time stable Incremental improvements since v0.1, but mostly stable API.
astropy.units stable New in v0.2. Adapted from pnbody and integrated into Astropy.
astropy.utils dev This sub-package contains mostly utilities destined for use in other parts of Astropy, and is not yet stable.
astropy.vo planned  
astropy.wcs stable 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.