VMS/IRAF Installation and Site Manager's Guide

VMS/IRAF Installation and Site Manager's Guide

9.2. Layered software support

An IRAF installation consists of the core system and any number of external packages, or "layered" software products. As the name suggests, layered software products are layered upon the core IRAF system. Layered software depends upon the core system for all of its functionality and is portable to any computer which already runs IRAF. Any number of layered products can be combined with the core system to produce the IRAF system used at a specific site. Due to disk space limitations it is likely that a given site will not wish to have all the available layered software products installed and on line at any one time.

The support provided for layered software is essentially the same as that provided for maintaining the core system itself. Each "external package" (in most cases this actually refers to a tree of packages) is a system in itself, similar in structure to the core IRAF system. Hence, there is a LIB, one or more BINs, a HELP database, and all the sources and runtime files. A good example of an external package is the NOAO package. Except for the fact that NOAO happens to be located in the IRAF root directory, NOAO is equivalent to any other layered product, e.g., STSDAS, PROS, CTIOLOCAL, KPNOLOCAL, etc. Other layered products should be rooted somewhere outside the [IRAF] directory tree to simplify updates.