ctools

This is already an impressive table of contents!

I was wondering whether you want to add a section about stacked analysis, or is this covered already by the binned analysis?

I also see that there is no section about general model fitting (e.g. determining spectral parameters of a model, or th position and size of a source).

This is already an impressive table of contents!

Thanks, I believe it will simplify the users life if we give a lot of details here.

I was wondering whether you want to add a section about stacked analysis, or is this covered already by the binned analysis?

Yes, it is probably just a vocabulary thing. In my view a binned analysis is always also stacked. Therefore, in the binned analysis section, only stacked analysis is explained . I will modify the wording to call it stacked analysis.

I also see that there is no section about general model fitting (e.g. determining spectral parameters of a model, or th position and size of a source).

In the unbinned and “binned” analysis sections, I basically explain how to run ctlike. But you are right, I should probably get into more detail regarding the options in model fitting (e.g. tscalc=1). I could add a section “Create a model XML file” and link to the docs of the general models and add some information on the user options. Is that what you mean?

Mayer Michael wrote:

In the unbinned and “binned” analysis sections, I basically explain how to run ctlike. But you are right, I should probably get into more detail regarding the options in model fitting (e.g. tscalc=1). I could add a section “Create a model XML file” and link to the docs of the general models and add some information on the user options. Is that what you mean?

Ok, it is fine to have the model fitting in the unbinned and binned sections. Just wanted to make sure that it’s somewhere.

I merged in the code. It’s in devel now. I started also reading and did some minor typo corrections.

Thanks for merging and correcting the typos.

One comment I have is that some of the documentation copies quite some information from other places (for example the stacked analysis is described at http://cta.irap.omp.eu/ctools/user_manual/getting_started/beyond_stacked.html). It would be better to refer to the existing sections, and only add additional information that is necessary for IACT analysis. Otherwise we duplicate the documentation, and maintenance of the material will become difficult.

I completely agree. I actually wasn’t aware of that section and just wrote down the workflow one by one. We should definitely remove that passage and link to the existing one.

Okay, when I will find some time I will go over the text and modify it to reduce duplications. I will keep this in a separate branch so that you can cross check it before making it public.

Are you planning to do anything about this issue before release 1.1.0? If not I would change the target version to the next release.

Yes indeed, I wanted to go over the sections today and add some information about energy dispersion in stacked analysis. This seems to be related to #1811.

Merged into devel.

I propose to keep it like this for the next release, but we really should simplify as much as possible the User documentation and avoid “code” duplication. It will just be a nightmare to maintain this. Already now we have a quite extended documentation code base, and we should think about how to make this slimmer, focusing on the essential things.

I was thinking for example to split the analysis page into subpages which are smaller (the page is now very long), and this would be the occasion to simply link in the ctools description. A reader could then still see this as a linearly connected text, but it would have the advantage of avoiding duplications.

I have added some explanations about cstsmapsplit to the tips and tricks section. The modifications are on branch 1646-add-cstssplit-to-docs. It would be nice if this could still go in 1.1.0.

For 1.2.0, we should make an issue with a reminder to refactor the documentation (this could also be a task for the coding sprint).

Yes, I had planned to move this in the release. I’m still in the process to test the release procedure, now the following commands should work:

make dist
make distcheck
make installcheck

Sounds like a great way to simplify the release procedure.

Mayer Michael wrote:

I have added some explanations about cstsmapsplit to the tips and tricks section. The modifications are on branch 1646-add-cstssplit-to-docs. It would be nice if this could still go in 1.1.0.

For 1.2.0, we should make an issue with a reminder to refactor the documentation (this could also be a task for the coding sprint).

Merged branch 1646-add-cstssplit-to-docs into devel.