The 35th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems 2025 in Görlitz, Germany

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) provides data reduction pipelines for the majority of current VLT instruments, several La Silla instruments and all future VLT and ELT instruments. Currently, there are approximately 30 pipelines available, each with a different support status: active, end of maintenance, or operational on hold. These distributions include a combination of C and Python code, as well as static calibration data in FITS format.
Maintaining both source and binary distributions for such a large and diverse set of packages across multiple operating systems presents considerable challenges. In particular, supporting recent macOS versions on both Intel and ARM64 architectures, as well as various Linux distributions, requires substantial effort. Until recently, supported installation methods included installation from source code, RPM (for Fedora, CentOS, and Scientific Linux), and MacPorts (for macOS). The absence of a native Ubuntu distribution of the pipelines forced users to compile the software from source kits — a time-consuming and resource-intensive process susceptible to build failures on specific system configurations.
To mitigate these issues, we have extended the existing distribution mechanisms by introducing container-based installations using Apptainer and a Homebrew-based installation. The latter supports multiple macOS versions and is compatible with various Linux distributions (including Ubuntu), offering a more flexible and user-friendly installation experience.