TABLES v3.0 RELEASE SUMMARY


The primary changes incorporated in this release are:

1) A FITS IMAGE extension may be opened as a table in order to access the
   header keywords by certain tasks that do not depend on actual table
   data such as THEDIT.
2) Access to FITS tables is now based on CFITSIO v2.401; CFITSIO has been
   built to support FITS files with up to 15,000 FITS extensions
   (previously the limit was 1000).
3) Updates to GFLIB for better handling of FITS files that are used in
   place of GEIS files. This is to support an update of the WFPC package
   in the next release that will support use of FITS format files as
   well as GEIS format files.
4) Various minor bug fixes and enhancements described in the detailed
   release notes

The Science Software Group is engaged in an effort to move to doing
most of its software development with Python. This release of
STSDAS/TABLES (v3.0) has new tasks that will require our new
command language for IRAF called PyRAF (see pyraf.stsci.edu).
PyRAF 1.0 is being released at the same time as STSDAS/TABLES v3.0.
Only STSDAS has Python-based tasks in this release. No tasks in
TABLES are Python-based tasks, though this may not be true in
future releases.

Packages or tasks that have had minor enhancements or bug fixes include:

fitsio.catfits
      .strfits
      .stwfits
ttools.keyselect
      .tabpar
      .tcopy
      .tcreate
      .thedit
      .tinfo
      .tjoin
      .tprint
      .trebin
      .tselect

Changes to libraries:

gilib
gflib
tbtables
tbtables.cfitsio

Parameter files that have changed (new parameters or new default values,
excluding parameters indicating version number changes):

ttools/tabpar.par	     - 'format' added
      /tunits.par	     - 'abrevtab' default changed env. var. name
                          in value
                       - 'unittab' default changed env. var. name 
                          in value

Parameter output changes:

ttools/info  - subtype output parameter for primary headers value 
               changed from "primary header" to "image".