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Theme: Other creative topics in astronomical software
After having some experience keeping two widely-used data access and analysis software packages in use for several decades each, I have found several ways to make packages portable, user-installable, and easily-repairable. These are not the only way to do this, but with software involving special knowledge of particular astronomical data types, more detailed expertise is required than most astronomers and astrophysicists are likely to have. In the case of files of images, spectra, and object catalogs, there are lots of formatting, mapping, and translation problems which can be solved with reliable software that relatively few people can write. RVSAO in IRAF SPP and WCSTools in C have been doing more and more of that since 1989 and 1994 respectively. It has come time to translate the RVSAO spectral redshift package out of IRAF, so the programming and user interface questions needed for that translation to RVTools will be discussed.