Documentation
===============
See the Users Guide and API documentation hosted at
http://pythonhosted.org/pyfits.

Important notice regarding the future of PyFITS
===============================================

All of the functionality of PyFITS is now available in `Astropy
<http://www.astropy.org>`_ as the `astropy.io.fits
<http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/io/fits/index.html>`_ package, which is now
publicly available. Although we will continue to release PyFITS separately in
the short term, including any critical bug fixes, we will eventually stop
releasing new versions of PyFITS as a stand-alone product. The exact timing of
when we will discontinue new PyFITS releases is not yet settled, but users
should not expect PyFITS releases to extend much past early 2014. Users of
PyFITS should plan to make suitable changes to support the transition to
Astropy on such a timescale. For the vast majority of users this transition is
mainly a matter of changing the import statements in their code--all APIs are
otherwise identical to PyFITS.  STScI will continue to provide support for
questions related to PyFITS and to the new ``astropy.io.fits package`` in
Astropy.

Development
=============
PyFITS is now on GitHub at:
https://github.com/spacetelescope/PyFITS

To report an issue in PyFITS, please create an account on GitHub and submit
the issue there, or send an e-mail to help@stsci.edu.  Before submitting an
issue please search the existing issues for similar problems.  Before asking
for help, please check the PyFITS FAQ for answers to your questions:
http://pythonhosted.org/pyfits/appendix/faq.html

The latest source code can be checked out from git with::

  git clone https://github.com/spacetelescope/PyFITS.git

An SVN mirror is still maintained as well::

  svn checkout https://svn6.assembla.com/svn/pyfits/trunk

For Packagers
===============
As of version 3.2.0 PyFITS supports use of the standard CFITSIO library for
compression support.  A minimal copy of CFITSIO is included in the PyFITS
source under cextern/cfitsio.  Packagers wishing to link with an existing
system CFITSIO remove this directory and modify the setup.cfg as instructed
by the comments in that file.  CFITSIO support has been tested for versions
3.08 through 3.30.  The earliers known fully working version is 3.09.  Version
3.08 mostly works except for a bug in CFITSIO itself when decompressing some
images with BITPIX=-64.  Earlier versions *may* work but YMMV.  Please send in
any results of experimentation with other CFITSIO versions.