Installing MCS

This is an optional package.
Within this course we use MCS only to allow programs written in a variety of languages, in particular IDL and Fortran, to connect to the MySQL server, perform any sort of query, including the administrative ones, and eventually get the resulting data in a convenient form. See the demos under the Soft directory or the MCS manual.

Source code:
mcs-0.3.3-alpha7.tar.gz

If you are familiar with GitHub packages, then can download it with:

git clone https://github.com/gcalderone/MCS.git

User manual:
https://ross.oas.inaf.it/mcs/mcs.pdf

In brief, in addition to Perl, here are the system packages you would need for a simple installation making use just of the cfitsio library (for the Debian / Ubuntu case):

sudo apt install perl
sudo apt install swig
sudo apt install libpcre++-dev
sudo apt install libcfitsio-dev

And if you want to have the python interface:

sudo apt install python-dev

To see all the configuration options:

./configure --help

Example configuration for IDL + cfitsio (assuming you have them installed on your machine):

tar zxvf mcs-0.3.3-alpha7.tar.gz
cd mcs-0.3.3-alpha7
./configure --enable-cfitsio --enable-idl
make
sudo make install

If you wanted to enable Python connectivity:

./configure --enable-cfitsio --enable-python

Note that you might need to specify where your python include files and library is by using python-config.
For example:

shell> which python-config
/usr/bin/python-config

./configure --enable-cfitsio --enable-python --with-python=/usr/bin/python-config