[Insight-developers] Installed ITK with shared libraries

[Brad King]

Zachary Pincus wrote:
>> To make this harder to forget we could do in ITK what I did last  year 
>> in VTK which is to provide a VTK_USE_RPATH option.  If this  option is 
>> ON then one can run from the build tree but the install  target 
>> installs nothing and prints a message explaining why.  If  the option 
>> is OFF then one may install but must set LD_LIBRARY_PATH  to run 
>> either from the build tree or from the install tree.
> 
> Thank you Brad for the suggestions. I think that this would be a good  
> start for making sure that people install ITK correctly.

In order to implement these changes correctly all the INSTALL_* rules 
must be updated.  I don't have time to do this right now but if someone 
volunteers I can get him/her started.

>> Avoiding the requirement of setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH for the install  
>> tree can be accomplished by using CMake's shared library version  
>> support to allow the ITK libs to be installed in PREFIX/lib instead  
>> of PREFIX/lib/InsightToolkit.  Then the ld.so.conf on the machine  
>> would help the libraries be found.
> 
> I'm all for this, too. (On Windows, would the libs also be installed  
> into a standard location for the loader to find?) What do the rest of  
> the ITK folks think about this?

On Windows the DLLs would get installed into PREFIX/bin (I think they 
are now anyway).  For executables in this directory they will 
automatically find their DLLs.  For other executables the location will 
have to be added to the PATH environment variable.

I would also be interested in comments from other developers.

-Brad