[Insight-developers] ITK 3.18 Plans : Moving Multi-threaded registration classes from Review

Thu Dec 3 20:59:17 EST 2009

Bill,

Let me elaborate and clarify on what Stephen posted.

(... and...please bear with me, this is a long email...)

There are two parallel maintenance efforts related to ITK.

A) On one hand, there is the work that Kitware does under
    a maintenance contract funded by the NLM.

                       and

B) On the other hand, there is the work that the larger ITK
     community does for ITK.

The work in (A) is mostly reserved for the kind of things
that require Kitware's infrastructure, and the kind of things
that no other organization would be able to do as effectively.
For example:

   - Hosting CDash dashboards
   - Hosting the Wiki, Bug Tracker, and CVS
   - Hosting the mailing lists
   - Hosting and maintaining the Insight Journal

and for dealing with specific tasks that provide coordination
and support to the community.  For example:

   - Coordinating releases
   - Fixing structural bugs
   - Providing support in the mailing list

In general, Kitware takes care of tasks that other academic
and industry sites will have a hard time justifying to their
management, and even to their own IT support.

The typical challenge for Kitware is to find a balance in which
we do "enough" to keep the ITK house in order, but without
doing "too much" as to take over the control of the toolkit.

If we err on the side of doing too much, and taking too much
control, then we would destroy the Open Source spirit of the
ITK community, and contributors would get discouraged.

If we err on the side of not doing enough, then the community
muscle will lack a structural back bone, and certain maintenance
tasks may not be performed, leading to the deterioration of the
toolkit.

Since we have a limited maintenance budget (as all budgets are)
for the work in (A), what we usually do is to list specific tasks that
Kitware must get done under that budget and during the one-year
period of maintenance.  Stephen is referring to that list that we
drafted as our target.

When we say that we "put some limits on the release efforts",
we mean that only a certain portion of our maintenance budget
will be dedicated to those specific efforts, simply because there
are also other things in the list.

This doesn't mean that we are imposing limits on the community
as a whole. That is we are not suggesting any limits on (B).

Even if we sometimes may really want to do such evil things
[ e.g. like getting rid of VS6.0   :-)     ]   we have to bow to the
governance of ITK, which is fundamentally driven by the community.
Should the community decide (and volunteer) to do other tasks,
then, by all means we (Kitware) are in no position to restrict them.

So, let me rephrase Stephen's post:

Using Kitware's NLM  maintenance budget, we planned to
focus on only one major release during this year of funding,
accompanied by two low-key releases that mostly carry
bug fixes.  The rationale is that in anticipation of ITK 4.0,
it didn't make sense to make big changes in the toolkit,
using current (limited) maintenance funding, if we were
expecting to have a larger funding, including both Kitware
and other academic and industry partners for doing a large
scale overhaul of the toolkit for the creation of  ITK 4.0.

The larger release that Stephen is talking about is intended
to Hold-the-ITK-Fort during the time that ITK 4.0 will be under
development (about 6 to 12 months).  Therefore, we are
looking with that release to a very very stable, release.
Meaning, that such release will not bring much new features, nor
new code. Instead it will focus on cleaning up a large portion
of the bugs that are logged in the bug tracker.

More specifically, our release assumptions are

* January 2010:  ITK 3.18  Low-key relase
* July      2010:  ITK 3.20   Solid release
* Sept     2010:  ITK 3.22   Low key release
* Nov      2010:  ITK 4.0 ??? (subject to RFP)

What we consider to be a low-key release is to
move 4~6 papers from the Insight Journal into
the Review directory, and to do the usual freeze
and clean up period.

The Solid release included a lot of bug fixes,
and moving some large contributions from
the Insight Journal to Insight Applications.
In particular we were looking into moving
the VV (4D Slicer) application from Creatis,
now that Qt is distributed under an LGPL
license, and potentially factorizing some
of its components to make easier for people
to create other Qt+ITK applications, just as
we did in the early years of the toolkit with
FLTK+ITK applications.

All that said, the RFP for an ITK 4.0 has not
been posted as early as we were expecting,
so all that planning above, may or may not
happen.

Coming back to my original post:

What I'm proposing for the release of ITK 3.18 is:

1) Moving about 5 papers from the Insight Journal

2) Moving the multi-threaded classes from Review
    to Algorithms

3) Fixing the 64 bits issues in Mac and Windows.

Of course, it is part of our job (as Kitware) to encourage
and help all the members of the community to take on
maintenance responsibilities. So, if other groups have
needs and/or interests on moving more code, that simply
has to be brought to be discussed and coordinated here
in the developers-list.

           Luis

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Bill Lorensen <bill.lorensen at gmail.com> wrote:
> First I heard of the one release restriction. Can someone elaborate?
>
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Stephen Aylward
> <stephen.aylward at kitware.com> wrote:
>> Hi Luis,
>>
>> Recall there is only funding for one main release over the next 12
>> months.  The goal was to focus on getting stuff into
>> InsightApplications from the IJ.   I also agree moving code from
>> Review to main ITK should be pursued.    The other releases weren't
>> suppose to do much moving from IJ to ITK in anticipation of ITK v4.
>>
>> Are you planning on 3.18 being the big ITK release between now and next October?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Stephen
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Luis Ibanez <luis.ibanez at kitware.com> wrote:
>>> As the release date of ITK 3.18 gets closer,
>>> we should start defining what we want to see
>>> included in this release.
>>>
>>> We have a list of IJ papers that are suggested
>>> to be moved into Review for ITK 3.18.
>>>
>>> And we probably should try to move some code
>>> from Review into final destination directories.
>>>
>>> ----
>>>
>>> In particular, there is some interest in moving
>>> the multi-threaded registration metrics and their
>>> auxiliary classes.
>>>
>>> Officially, some of the Linux distributions
>>> (Fedora and Debian) cannot include the files in
>>> Review and Patented due to their unclear
>>> licensing status.
>>>
>>>
>>> ---
>>>
>>>
>>> Does anyone have objections to moving these
>>> registration classes from Code/Review into
>>> Code/Algorithms ?
>>>
>>>
>>>    Thanks for any comments,
>>>
>>>
>>>              Luis
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Stephen R. Aylward, Ph.D.
>> Director of Medical Imaging Research
>> Kitware, Inc. - North Carolina Office
>> http://www.kitware.com
>> stephen.aylward (Skype)
>> (919) 969-6990 x300
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>