[vtkusers] New vtk debs based on CVS source: some comments.

[David Gobbi]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Prabhu Ramachandran wrote:

> hi,
> 
> Last night I made debian potato packages for VTK using the CVS tree as
> on 20001120.  The debs build fine.  I am using Sebastien Barre
> et. al.'s scripts to generate the doxygen compatible headers and the
> documentation.  So far, I have tested the vtk-tcl and vtk-python debs
> and they seem fine.  The c++ deb must also be ok. I do not use java so
> I have been unable to test the java bindings.  I guess they should be
> fine.  There are a few issues with the documentation, mostly because
> the docs doxygen generates are so voluminous.

Just a quick note:  I just changed vtk/python/Makefile.in so that it
builds and installs a 'vtkpython.pth' file to allow python to find
(prefix)/lib/vtk/python without the user having to set the PYTHONPATH
environment variable.  If you could have the debs install this file
that would be great.  The corresponding .spec file line for the file is

%files python
%attr(644, root, root) %(python -c "import sys, os; print os.path.join(sys.prefix,'lib','python'+sys.version[0:3],'site-packages','vtkpython.pth')")

(I don't know anything about debs, though).
 
>        Your work on the python wrappers is fantastic!  Actually, I
>        don't need to use the recursive function you sent to get all
>        the methods.  Plain old dir seems to work fine.  I checked with
>        a few vtk objects and it works fine.  Hence, the
>        vtkPipelineBrowser works beautifully as it is and still cashes
>        off your hard work. :) I can of course optimise it for speed
>        and eliminate some unnecessary stuff that I do.  Thanks a ton.

Thanks.  After a bit of thought, I decided to make 'dir' on the objects
to recurse to the subclasses (dir(obj.__class__) works the way the old
'dir' did).

The only other change I have planned for the python wrappers is better
__doc__ strings, both for the methods and the classes.  Mainly, the
method .__doc__s should reflect python calling conventions instead of
C++, i.e. vtkActor.GetPosition.__doc__ should return

'o.GetPosition() -> (float, float, float)'

instead of

'float  *GetPosition ();'

I'm willing to hear people's comments on this.  I don't have any timeline
for the changes.

 - David

--
  David Gobbi, MSc                    dgobbi at irus.rri.on.ca
  Advanced Imaging Research Group
  Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario