VTK/ARB/Topics/Easy Access to External Contributions to VTK
This page is a work in progress
VTK does not provide a good mechanism to access external contributions. This topic page brainstorms solutions.
There are several sources of external contributions:
- The VTK Journal
- The VTK Wiki Examples
- User established git repositories
One user, David Doria, has set up a github repo with his contributions.
VTK Journal
The VTK Journal has the potential to provide peer-reviewed papers and code for vtk users. Its sibling, the ITK Journal has been in use for several years. The original intent of the ITK Journal was to serve as a staging area for user contributions to ITK. ITK Journal articles would be selected for inclusion into ITK's Review tree. There the code would be verified, cleaned up and tested before moving into the official ITK stable code base. Unfortunately, there are two common situations:
- Code is moved into Review, but never makes it into the stable code base
- Good code remains in the Journal and users have to integrate it themselves
Since the VTK Journal is relatively new, there are not too many articles available. This article, Boolean Operations on Surfaces for VTK is a great example of a valuable resource for the vtk community. Unfortunately it uses some LGPL libraries so it can never be part of VTK proper. To use the code, you download a tarball, extract it, and run cmake.
