[vtk-developers] Re-organization of vtk Tcl packages

[Sebastien BARRE]

At 31/08/01 16:39, Blezek, Daniel J (CRD) wrote:

>   Jim Miller and I spent some time today re-organizing the Tcl packages 
> for VTK.  We created a
>hierarchy of packages to make VTK more Tcl friendly.  This work does not 
>interfere with the current vtktcl package that Sebastian put together, but 
>we really need only one mechanism, so I'll collect votes, and if there is 
>enough support for one package over the other, we'll go with that.

I don't want to push my package to the top, there is no need to vote on my 
side if your solution does the same thing and more :)

>   The new setup breaks VTK's Tcl interface into several packages:
>
>vtkbase - contains code to load libvtk*TCL.so/.dll
>vtkcommon - loads vtkCommonTCL.so
>vtkfiltering, vtkio, vtkgraphics, vtkimaging, etc.. - load the library, 
>and dependant libs
>vtk - loads all the kits, and colors.tcl, etc...

I'd have appreciated a more modern approach/syntax, namespace-based :

::vtk
::vtk::base
::vtk::filtering
etc.

This would allow us to put variables in the namespace in the future, etc.

>Please let me know what you think, and give it a try, the code is all 
>checked in.

You mean MakePackages.tcl ?

Well, we had a discussion about that privately, but I do not see how it can 
work. It just plain crash for Windows. Furthermore, how are you going to 
handle auto-refresh, as well as auto-initalization code (stuff done for 
vtkWin32RenderWindowInteractor for example) ?

As I told you, our "package" are not "competing", yours has a finer 
granularity because I thought it would not be useful at the time I wrote 
vtktcl, but this is of course a good idea. On the other hand there is more 
to thing to do to make it work on all platform, without too much hassle to 
maintain, etc.

Basically, what do you exactly wanted to know by voting ? The fact that VTK 
can be loaded component by component ? That's OK by me, no pb.