[Insight-developers] Adding MINC to ITK

[Luis Ibanez]

As you probably know, there is an ongoing effort
for adding support for the MINC2 file format(s)
to ITK.

This is based on the following contribution to the
Insight Journal:
http://insight-journal.org/dspace/handle/1926/191

With reviews:
http://www.insight-journal.org/InsightJournalManager/view_reviews.php?back=&journalid=4&pubid=88

The proposal page can be found in the ITK Wiki at:
http://www.itk.org/Wiki/Proposals:Adding_MINC_File_Format


One of the implications of adding support for MINC2
is that we should decide whether to include or not
the following third party libraries into ITK:

   - MINC2
   - HDF5
   - NetCDF

Details about the libraries have been added to:
http://www.itk.org/Wiki/Proposals:Adding_MINC_File_Format#Third_party_libraries


Their licenses seem to be compatible with the
BSD-like license used by ITK.

The source sizes of the libraries is:

   MINC2  =  7.6 Mb
   HDF5   =  5.2 Mb
   NetCDF =  0.5 Mb
  ------------------
   Total  = 13.3 Mb

The current size of ITK source code is 98Mb,
and the size of the Utilities subdirectory is 28.8Mb

If we add these libraries, the Utilities directory
will become 42Mb, and ITK total will be about 112 Mb.


HDF5 is currently included in ParaView
NetCDF is currently included in VTK

This means that we probably should anticipate mangling
the symbols of these libraries, to avoid conflicts when
linking projects with VTK.



We welcome any comments regarding whether we should
include these libraries in the Utilities directory
or not.


     Thanks


       Luis