[Insight-developers] proposal: remove the gdcm build options from ITK

[Mark Roden]

Hi,

Previously, there were itk-gdcm specific tests, that could be run by typing

ctest -R itkGDCM

Those tests are no longer present since modularization.  I do not know
if they have been removed because they don't match the expectations of
the new scheme, or as an oversight, or if the gdcm_build_tests cmake
flag was supposed to cover it.  I'm putting this discussion on the
insight developers list as a result, so that perhaps I can get some
feedback on that.

Personally, I think that we should just have the itk gdcm tests back,
and not have the same coverage as the rest of gdcm.  ITK devs, at
least for the moment, don't need a complete tag editing solution, they
need to be able to read and write various forms of image data.  I'm
fairly certain that the previous test suite covered those cases.

The testing data size is a few megs, so not a big deal, and it's
retrieved through a git submodule init call in the gdcm root
directory.  That is a bit of a pain for deployment purposes, because
it means that any user who wants to use gdcm has to get a particular
set of images for testing, and they have to use a series of
non-obvious steps to get those images and set up the testing directory
(which is, as I said, currently blank).  I suppose that could be done
through the setupfordevelopment script, but that seems like overkill,
especially if the older itkgdcm tests did the job.

Mark

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 10:35 PM, Alex Gouaillard <agouaillard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi mark.
>
>> it would be good to know how these tests worked in the
>> past.
>
> Your job to find out.
>
> Then if those tests were not included, please answer the following questions first:
> - are those testing gdcm features exposed in itk ? If not, no need in itk proper.
> - what is the size of the testing data?
> - how do you get the data? (cvs? Svn? Tarball?...)
>
> Gaetan, can you then advice on using external project Thingy from cmake 2.8 ?
>
>>
>> Mark
>>
>> 2011/3/11 Gaëtan Lehmann <gaetan.lehmann at jouy.inra.fr>:
>>>
>>> Le 12 mars 11 à 01:04, Mark Roden a écrit :
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> So I notice that under the new (and the old, incidentally) cmake
>>>> options for itk, there are the four canonical gdcm options, namely:
>>>>
>>>> build_applications
>>>> build_examples
>>>> build_shared_libs
>>>> build_testing
>>>>
>>>> However, since the gdcm stuff is supposed to be rolled in directly
>>>> with ITK, these options don't make a whole lot of sense to me.
>>>> Indeed, choosing build_testing as an option leads to cmake errors
>>>> which, when solved, lead to many compilation errors when testing is
>>>> turned on.
>>>>
>>>> I propose to remove these options from the build process entirely.
>>>> The user isn't interested in gdcm per se, but in having dicom support
>>>> in itk.  That means that these options are not useful to the user, and
>>>> can only cause building problems.
>>>>
>>>> Thoughts?
>>>>
>>>> Mark
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Mark,
>>>
>>> I'd keep the tests, and turn them on automatically when ITK's option
>>> BUILD_TESTING is on. I don't think you will reimplement all the gdcm tests
>>> in ITK, so it would be nice that gdcm can be tested on the user system with
>>> the other ITK tests.
>>> This wouldn't be the only case: VXL tests are run with the ITK tests for
>>> example.
>>>
>>> Gaëtan
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Gaëtan Lehmann
>>> Biologie du Développement et de la Reproduction
>>> INRA de Jouy-en-Josas (France)
>>> tel: +33 1 34 65 29 66    fax: 01 34 65 29 09
>>> http://voxel.jouy.inra.fr  http://www.itk.org
>>> http://www.mandriva.org  http://www.bepo.fr
>>>
>>>
>