[Ctk-developers] Coming changes in External project organization

[Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin]

Hi Folks,

Using CTK as an external project in more and more project, the path length
could be an issue on windows platform.
Indeed, the path length on windows is limited to 260 characters. [1]

*What motivates this change:*

Such problem could arise, if, for example, your project is build in folder
like:

"c:/Dashboards/Nightly/YourProject-Superbuild-Qt-PythonQt-With-Tcl-NoCLI-nightly"


"YourProject" relying also on Superbuild and using CTK as an external
project .. will fail to build for some obscure reason.


*Current CTK organization:*

Currently the project are organized as described below:

 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/CMakeExternals/Build/VTK
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/CMakeExternals/Build/DCMTK
...
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/CMakeExternals/Source/VTK
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/CMakeExternals/Source/DCMTK
...
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/CMakeExternals/Download/VTK
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/CMakeExternals/Download/DCMTK
...
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/CMakeExternals/Stamp/VTK
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/CMakeExternals/Stamp/DCMTK
...
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/CTK-build


*Solution proposed:*

With some minor changes, the structure would like:

 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/CTK-build
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/VTK
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/VTK-build
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/VTK-cmake/src
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/VTK-cmake/tmp
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/VTK
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/DCMTK-build
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/DCMTK-cmake/src
 <CTK-SUPERBUILD>/DCMTK-cmake/tmp

Pros:
  - Doing so will decrease the average length of external project path
associated with CTK.
  - If needed, make the "cleaning" of external project easier "rm VTK*"
instead of "cd" in each CMakeExternals sub folders ..

*Action plan:*

I plan to implement and test this change this coming week.

That improvment shouldn't cause any issue, but If it happens to be a problem
within your project and you require some time to figure out a fix or would
like to contact me. Please, do it before the end of the week :)

Next week, following your comments I will then integrate the change to CTK
master.

Thanks
Jc

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247%28VS.85%29.aspx#maxpath

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