CIAO: A Look Under the Hood of Chandra's X-Ray Imaging and Analysis Software Configuration Management Past, Present, and Future

The CIAO (Chandra Interactive Analysis of Observations) software suite is approaching two decades of service' and CIAO remains the primary analysis package from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Despite the package's maturity, CIAO continues to undergo active development from a diverse group of developers, using multiple programming languages and build infrastructures. Keeping up with the ever-evolving capabilities in hardware, software, version control systems, and paradigm shifts in software development methodologies presents a challenge to both developers and configuration management teams. This paper provides an overview of how the CIAO software suite has evolved over the years with a particular emphasis on configuration management of the system. Additionally, we describe CIAO's integration with various off the shelf software with a focus on recent changes with Python package management and distribution. We will conclude with an outlook on the future direction of CIAO infrastructure including possible integration with modern package management systems such as Conda and plans for Continuous Integration.