Replace spacetelescope/stregion dependency with astropy/regions

[larrybradley]

The spacetelescope/stregion dependency is a frozen copy of spacetelescope/pyregion, which in turn is a frozen copy of astropy/pyregion, which has not been maintained for many years. The astropy/pyregion package has been superseded by the astropy/regions package (I am the maintainer). The regions API is different from pyregion, but it should have all the features that drizzlepac needs.

This is an issue because spacetelescope/stregion cannot be built with Python 3.12.

[jhunkeler]

https://github.com/spacetelescope/stregion/pull/11 fixes the build issue with Python 3.12.

[stscijgbot-hstdp]

This issue is tracked on JIRA as HLA-1162.

[larrybradley]

Why was this closed? I don't see where stregion was replaced with astropy/regions. https://github.com/spacetelescope/drizzlepac/blob/main/pyproject.toml#L31

[s-goldman]

Sorry @larrybradley, you're right. It seems that we fixed the build issue, but there is still stregion code in drizzlepac. We are now tracking that with issue #1742 which is also tracked on JIRA. Thanks for reminding me to add a note here.

[stscijgbot-hstdp]

Comment by Nadia Dencheva on JIRA:

Some notes from Mihai who developed this code originally:

I think it would be a major work to switch to astropy regions. Also, it may not be possible to do what pyregions could do with astropy/regions (at least at the beginning, they did not handle distortions and didn’t care about them – that’s why I decided to keep using pyregions/stregions). Maybe things have changed, but one needs to investigate this.```