[Insight-developers] ITK tree layout

[Bill Lorensen]

Guys,

I hate to beat a dead horse, but VTK and ITK are both associated with
Kitware and there are many common developers.

Arguments have been made on the ITK side, that the current ITK/ITK
naming conventions is justified,

as Brad stated:
"One of the goals of modularization is to make it easy to add custom
modules to ITK and produce a custom distribution.  With the current
layout that can be done by just creating a local branch from ITK and
adding the custom modules in a new directory.  The current modularization
infrastructure will pick up the new directory automatically with no changes
to the CMake code.  Then one can update ITK just by merging from upstream."

and Jim agreed with Brad (I think):
"The ITK/ITK sounded weird to me at first. I was actually wondering if
it was a stopgap position until the rest of the toolkit was
flushed-out (Examples, Tests).  But I think Brad's point of having the
inner ITK directory parallel to custom directories is interesting.
That was certainly how we used to structure things.  With CMake and
recent advances in CMake, I am not sure this strategy is needed
anymore.  "

Do the same arguments hold for VTK? If not, why not?

Marcus said regarding VTK/VTK,
"There are no plans to do that in VTK."

Luis has argued,
"Why should they have a similar naming convention ?
They are two different toolkits.
The naming convention of one does not interfere
with the naming convention of the other."

Hans has said,
"The path to code has a repeated name "src/ITK/ITK/Core/Common"  Note
the ITK/ITK.  This makes it difficult to communicate with other
developers verbally when trying to work through problems.  "Goto the
upper level ITK directory" "Goto the nested ITK directory below the
ITK directory".   Perhaps this directory could be renamed back to
Code, or some other unique name.  This should be done quickly before
the developers fingers learn this pattern.  This is also annoying,
because my shell prompt shows me the directory name that I am
currently in, and with replicated naming scheme my current working
directory displayed is now ambiguous."

and I suggested,
"Rather than
ITK/ITK
how about
ITK/Modules"

I'm willing to accept two solutions if they can be rationalized to the
vtk/itk communities in the future.

Bill