[Insight-developers] Integrating the New Statistics framework into ITK

[Bradley Lowekamp]

On Apr 9, 2009, at 4:22 PM, Luis Ibanez wrote:

> Bill Lorensen wrote:
>>
>> Just a few initial comments:
>>
>> I see in general that Calculators have been replaced with Filters. It
>> is a great idea to have filters. However, I'm suprised that the
>> calculators are gone. In other parts of ITK, we have both Calculators
>> and Filters. The Filters are implemented using the Calculators.
>>
>> I wonder was there any consideration to minimize backward  
>> compatibility issues.
>>
...

> But...
> we don't have both a MedianImageFilter and a MedianImageCaculator,
> we don't have AnisotropicImagefilter and AnisotropicImageCalculators
> ... etc... That is, not every filter is duplicated into a calculator.
>
> This latter will be more a duplication of functionality (not to
> mention a maintenance nightmare).
>



On Apr 9, 2009, at 9:25 AM, Stephen Aylward wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 8:21 AM, Hans Johnson <hans- 
> johnson at uiowa.edu> wrote:
>> GREAT!  A consensus is being reached.
>> Result: Backward compatibility trumps fixing inconsistent behavior!
>
> Actually...
> "Backward compatibility trumps all" (c) 2009 (TM) All rights reserved.


I think maintainability can be more important the backwards  
compatibility in some cases. I have concerns about the number of  
duplicate files, number of needed #ifdef, and then number of builds  
that will be needed to get good coverage on yet another build option.  
We don't want ITK to collapse under it's own weight of maintainability.

I also don't have a clear idea of what the goals of integration are.  
What are the possible choices? How may other files in ITK depend on  
the Statistics? How will they be ported?

I am under the opinion that both need to live together for a  
transition period, and then warn the user community of the impending  
change. In this case, if a user wants the old statistics, perhaps we  
could have an separate library for users to utilized these deprecated  
classes. This would be very similar to how I am now using the re- 
factored statistics now, it's just another library in my programs.

Brad

========================================================
Bradley Lowekamp
Lockheed Martin Contractor for
Office of High Performance Computing and Communications
National Library of Medicine
blowekamp at mail.nih.gov


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