XSPEC module is specific to a single patch / should autogenerate the interface code about sherpa

[DougBurke]

Ahhh, there's a new release of XSPEC being tested, so I guess this is more relevant that I realised this morning!

[anetasie]

Yes. The new patch was just released and include the updates to NEI models

[DougBurke]

Aneta, I was talking about the next release, which is in the testing stage but not-yet released, not the latest patch.

[DougBurke]

Note that Xspec 12.9.0 has now been released. It contains one new model, a few changes to the API functions (none relevant to the functions we currently use), and changes in the parameter names (e.g. see #74) and values.

[DougBurke]

I have started a branch over at https://github.com/DougBurke/sherpa/tree/feature/build-xspec-module to explore auto-generating the interface to the model.dat models. It re-uses code from the code I wrote to support Xspec user models in Sherpa, rather than the existing code in the scripts/ directory, as I was much-more familiar with the former.

At present the branch just permits the creation of code; it does not try to include the code in the build, as there needs to be some manual verification that the code does not diverge from the hand-edited code currently in sherpa/astro/xspec/__init__.py and sherpa/astro/xspec/src/_xspec.cc.