[vtk-developers] VTK modularization update

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 7:35 PM, Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin
<jchris.fillionr at kitware.com> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> From Slicer build system perspective, some important elements to consider:
>
>   - find_package(VTK .. COMPONENT ..) : Similarly to what ITKv4 proposed,
> the idea is to call find_package( .. ) within each library/module so that
> VTK_LIBRARIES is set accordingly
>
>   - installing just the RuntimeLibraries component should work. See [1]
>
>   - Library like vtkRendering shouldn't depend on Qt. Qt dependency should
> be introduced at the application level.
>
>   - Library like (vtk)zlib which are internally configured/build should be
> exposed or it should be possible to provide its own version. While working
> Slicer I factor out the zlib library from CMake because we needed it to
> build LibArchive. See [2] .. and it wasn't possible to depend on the one
> provided by VTK .. the header isn't designed for that.
>
>   - If not yet done, project like kwsys could also be factored out, it would
> be very helpful

I would encourage you to look at the modularized VTK tree (or wait
until we merge and look at it then). Most of these are done, we have
reused as much code as is practical from ITK (and Brad has been
working on adapting some of the code with us).

The kwsys code will not be factored out for modularization, it could
be revisited once the modular tree has been committed. Further moves
and modification can (and will) take place after we have modularized
VTK.

Marcus