Clean up WCS utility functions

[stscijgbot-jp]

Issue JP-3896 was created on JIRA by Ned Molter:

There are a few functions in assign_wcs.util that appear to be unused, namely:

domain_to_bounding_box : unused, and private

reproject : part of all but unused elsewhere in the pipeline, there are also multiple functions of the same name in stcal with similar (identical?) functionality

compute_fiducial : Only used inside a test of the resample step - perhaps this means it should be moved to stcal, or can be removed entirely?

is_fits : unused

get_num_msa_open_shutters : unused

We should figure out which of these can be deprecated and/or removed, and then do so.

[braingram]

The _sregion_to_footprint function in test_nircam might also fit with this list:

jwst/jwst/assign_wcs/tests/test_nircam.py

Line 250 in 382532d

def _sregion_to_footprint(s_region):

[stscijgbot-jp]

Comment by Ned Molter on JIRA:

Nadia Dencheva I'm curious to hear your opinion on this.  Do you know of any uses of these functions outside the pipeline, or other reasons they should be retained?  Do you know of other functions or methods that should also be removed?

 

I'm wondering whether these should have a deprecation period or not.  We normally assume that anything not in the documentation isn't part of the public API and could simply be removed.  I checked the assign_wcs docs and indeed none of these are documented there.  But perhaps it's safest to at least deprecate the ones in the _{_}all{_}_