Adding JPEG output image file support to VTK

[Sean Spicer]

Will, Others,

The development of effective interfaces between vtk and external software
packages is of critical importance to many of us in the general vtk
community -- What we all have to realize though, is that these interfaces
in most cases are not part of the "core" of vtk, they are simply there to
augment the current functionality provided.  I've developed several
interfaces between vtk and external packages either written by me, other
individuals, and other organizations, and while I don't pretend that all
of these interfaces should be provided as part of the standard vtk
distribution, certainly some of them may benefit other programmers.  I'm
guessing that there are a number of people out there with similar
contributions to make.  

My suggestion would be to set aside a section of the kitware website as a
repository for contributed code and examples, provided with documentation
from the author as to system requirements, dependencies/conflicts, and an
appropriate usage/license agreement (GNU public license for
example).  All such code would then be available to the user by
(hopefully) downloading the source into local/ or contrib/, editing
user.make, and building the appropriate directory.  (see
http://solvedeath.stanford.edu/~spicer/vtk-volumizer for an example)

This solution would enable members of our little community to share code,
without kitware necessarily becoming directly involved in maintaining
Makefiles and test suites for contributed code.  

What do people think?

sean


On Tue, 9 May 2000, Will Schroeder wrote:

> Hi John-
> 
> I've been away for a couple of days, sorry for the late response.
> 
> Why don't you send me the diffs. I'll look into getting them into the system. And thanks for the contribution.
> 
> The work you've done raises some issues that we've been wrestling with. 
> Namely, how do we include software that has dependencies on external packages? Certainly your addition is extremely valuable and many people would like to use it. On the other hand, since the contribution requires additional external software, it ends up making VTK harder to compile and test.  Do you (or anyone on this list) have any ideas on how to manage this situation?
> 
> Will

___________________________________________________________________________
Sean Spicer                       Stanford University Medical Center  
Biomechanical Engineering         Division of Vascular Surgery, Suite H3642
Cardiovascular Biomechanics Lab   Stanford CA, 94305 
                                  Telephone...650.723.1695
                                  Fax.........650.723.8762

             http://solvedeath.stanford.edu/~spicer
 

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