Hi Tim!

Warren Morningstar (Stanford PHD student, @wmorning) and I are doing some ALMA simulation work, and starting to use this marvelous little interface that you have written. Thank you! For now we are simply using the pip-installed code, but in future it's possible that Warren will want to make some modifications. Thank you for providing such good documentation on how to do this. I have (in time-honored academic style) a question and a comment. First: when the time comes, which of your papers would you recommend we (read and then) cite? We'll put a note in the acknowledgments too, but a citation is worth more. Second: have you considered putting a license file in your repo? At the moment you are both encouraging people to modify your code, but also labeling it copyright - so it might be good to clear that up by adopting the MIT license or something, to make it clear that you are fully open source. I usually put a note on both accreditation and licensing in the README, and other docs too.

Thanks again for the code!

Phil Marshall
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

PS. I am visiting Oxford in May. Hopefully see you then!

Generate rst, upload to readthedocs.org.

Hi,
The current drive-casa clean command can only handle a single visibility file as input. Casapy clean can take multiple visibilities as input (as a python list). Is it possible to add this support?

Regards
Dave

Edit: I added support to the clean command. Have a look and see if it fits. Thanks.

For remote connections, it is very handy to be able to turn off CASA's gui. The normal invocation I use is:
casapy --nogui --nologger

The following accomplishes this on my local version:

--- a/drivecasa/interface.py
+++ b/drivecasa/interface.py
@@ -42,6 +42,7 @@ class Casapy(object):
timeout=600,
log2term=True,
echo_to_stdout=False,

•             gui=True,
            ):
   """
   Initialise a casapy instance.
  

  @@ -72,7 +73,8 @@ class Casapy(object):
  at the price of cluttering your working terminal. As an alternative,
  it is recommended to open a separate terminal and tail -f the
  casa_logfile.

•        gui: whether or not to start the CASA gui.  Setting this to False
  

•            turns it off (helpful for remote connections).
   """
   drivecasa.utils.ensure_dir(working_dir)
   # NB It would make sense to switch off ipython, ('noipython' flag)
  

  @@ -85,6 +87,8 @@ class Casapy(object):
  '--colors=NoColor',

  '--noipython',

           ]
  

•    if not gui:
  

•        cmd.append('--nogui')
  

Probably this should just be a pull request rather than an issue, but this is easier for me right now.

Thanks.

when I try to instanciate drive-casa with casa 5.1.1 I get:

In [4]: casa = drivecasa.Casapy()
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
RuntimeError                              Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-4-39119067182d> in <module>()
----> 1 casa = drivecasa.Casapy()

/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/drivecasa/interface.pyc in __init__(self, casa_logfile, commands_logfile, casa_dir, working_dir, timeout, log2term, echo_to_stdout)
    153                 self.child = None
    154         if self.child is None:
--> 155             raise RuntimeError("Could not spawn CASA instance")
    156         self.load_subroutines()
    157

RuntimeError: Could not spawn CASA instance

When I try to figure out what is wrong I actually just get a casa terminal:

In [4]: casa = drivecasa.Casapy(casa_dir='/opt/casalite-5.1.1/', echo_to_stdout=True)

=========================================
The start-up time of CASA may vary
depending on whether the shared libraries
are cached or not.
=========================================

IPython 5.1.0 -- An enhanced Interactive Python.

CASA 5.1.1-5   -- Common Astronomy Software Applications

2017-12-06 10:18:10     INFO    ::casa  CASA Version 5.1.1-5
--> CrashReporter initialized.
Enter doc('start') for help getting started with CASA...
Using matplotlib backend: TkAgg

CASA <1>:

So I guess drive-casa is not compatible with the latest casa?