[Ctk-developers] CTK Update to latest DCMTK

[Marco Nolden]

Hi all,

regarding fixed version vs HEAD I want to describe the situation for
MITK and DCMTK here but maybe it also affects other projects using CTK
and we could use it as a blueprint for similar situations:

- we already use DCMTK in MITK
- some projects using MITK require fixed versions of external libraries,
at least for "critical" components, and DCMTK is critical since it deals
with patient and image data
- recently we started using CTK in MITK and of course we would like to
"share" the same version of DCMTK

In my opinion there are different solutions to this:

1. We adapt the CTK code that uses DCMTK in a way that it supports both
3.6 and the current HEAD. Then projects using CTK could provide their
own DCMTK and everything works. It would still duplicate the CMake code
to build DCMTK as an external project, so we could maybe insert a switch
in CTK to select 3.6 or HEAD.

2. We leave the HEAD version. External projects have to make sure by
their own testing that the required DCMTK functionality works as
expected. Even then there should be some CMake mechanism to "freeze" the
DCMTK version that is checked out.

3. We stick to 3.6 and wait for the next official release.

I would prefer 1., but I cannot estimate how much effort this would be
and how much functionality we would "loose" in CTK while using the
stable version.
For 2.: maybe the intermediate versions of DCMTK are also very reliable
and stable and the "official releases" are only snapshots without
special testing.

Another remark regarding "versions": I know we agreed that CTK won't
have released versions soon since it is under heavy development. But I
think we shouldn't wait too long. For MITK we are now referring to fixed
version by using GIT hashes which works but is sometimes cubersome. The
debian packages already have a version number (0.1-2, 0.1-3). I know
this is very experimental, but still we could think of tagging certain
version of CTK just as a reference point for external projects.

Ok, sorry for the long mail, please comment!

Marco







On 07/29/2011 12:05 PM, OFFIS DICOM Team wrote:
> Hi Marco,
> 
> thanks for scanning through the changes!
> 
> Am 29.07.2011 11:57, schrieb Marco Nolden:
> 
>>> I also changed the repository location in the superbuild to fetch DCMTK
>>> from the official OFFIS repository at http://git.dcmtk.org/dcmtk.git .
>>> That works for me here.
>>
>> It works, but it is rather slow, takes about 10 minutes to clone from
>> DKFZ. I would also prefer to have an option to use an official release of
>> DCMTK, since we do that in MITK and also use CTK there. I already
>> commented on github, overlapping with this email, so I post the link
>> here, maybe the others could also comment on that topic:
>>
>> https://github.com/commontk/CTK/commit/1414293aec6c76bc5788e3ade9979150974bc568#commitcomment-502670
> 
> Please see some comments there.
> 
> Regarding the clone time: I guess the server is not the fastest machine and
> also http is not really the fastest git protocol ;) Maybe we can work on the
> second issue.
> 
> However, also consider that fetching updates will be much faster once you
> have a cloned copy.
> 
> Another option would be to not clone all commits from the last 15 years from
> DCMTK but to only clone the last 3 years or something. I did not try
> that but guess it is possible with git (right?) and maybe leads to a huge
> speedup.
> 
>>> Nevertheless, since these are my first actual commits to CTK, I expect
>>>  that I have done some mistakes, hopefully not too many serious ones ;)
>>>  Please tell me and I will correct that as soon as possible.
>>>
>> Everything looks fine to me. There is just one "Merge remote-tracking
>> branch 'origin/master'" commit we try to avoid in CTK by rebasing, but
>> that was probably just an accident.
> 
> Yes, thanks for noting and sorry for that. I should take better care of this
> in the future.
> 
> All the best,
> Michael
> 


-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dipl.-Inform. Med. Marco Nolden
Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum       (German Cancer Research Center)
Div. Medical & Biological Informatics          Tel: (+49) 6221-42 2325
Im Neuenheimer Feld 280                        Fax: (+49) 6221-42 2345
D-69120 Heidelberg                             eMail: M.Nolden at dkfz.de