[Insight-developers] PROPOSAL: Flattening headers directory structure at Install time

[Luis Ibanez]

We have found a couple of issues with the method
that we currently use for installing the ITK headers.

The current method preserves the tree structure of
the source three, namely:


             Common
             BasicFilters
             Algorithms
             etc....


The consequence is that projects that use ITK must
have all these directories in their include paths.
This results in something like 10 different directories
being added to the include paths.

Since there are no name conflicts in the header files,
we could copy all of them in a single directory.

This will make a lot simpler for users to refer to
ITK since they will only need to add one include
directory to their path, and only one directory
for the libraries.

ITK coding style doesn't use the subdirectories
explicitly. That is, we never do

    (A)  #include "Common/itkImage.h"

instead we do:

    (B)    #include "itkImage.h"


Which means that there shouldn't be any impact
on ITK code itself.

The potential problem will be for uses who may
have decided to use the notation (A) instead of
the recommended notation (B).


This is a significant improvement for projects
that not only used ITK but also link to other
three or four libraries (e.g. VTK, QT, ...)
and may reach limits of command line lengths.


We could target ITK 3.8 for making this change
on the installation process.



  Any thoughts ?


    Thanks


       Luis