[Insight-developers] Examples

[Bill Hoffman]

Hi all,

I have been converting ITK to cmake 1.4 for the past two days now.
I thought I was done, but then I turned on Examples and Aux and spent
another day at it....

I think we need to do some pruning in the Examples section of ITK. It has 
become very large with many "Examples".   There are about 50 examples right now. 
The disk usage is about 472 megs for Debug on Windows if you turn on all of them.  
The rest of ITK only uses 380 megs including all the tests.

In addition to the size, the ones using VTK and FLTK are difficult to configure
and build.   This makes for a rather long and frustrating build time.   

I think that several of the Examples are really applications.   I would
argue that ITK examples should not have any GUI or Vis in them at all.
The examples should be easy to understand and small.   Perhaps
having one example that shows how to use FLTK with ITK, and one for VTK,
would be a good thing.  However, having multiple, complex examples is
not really what these are supposed to be for.

Perhaps what we need is a new CVSROOT called ITKApplications or Applications 
into which we can move some of these things.   GUI code is often hard to follow 
because of the complications that the GUI adds to the code.  Although useful 
to have, they are not really ITK examples and may confuse users more than help them.
Users of ITK will need small isolated examples, not applications, that demo features
of ITK.

Perhaps we can create some sort of framework for the Examples like we
have done for the tests that would help with the compile time and disk
usage.   

BTW, 19 of the 50 examples currently use FLTK, and 5 of the 50 use VTK.

I am bringing this up in email, so folks can think about it some
before the tcon on Friday.

BTW, as promised ITK now requires cmake 1.4 patch 3.


-Bill