SimpleITK/Design And Proposals/SIP 001

JIRA Issue: SIMPLEITK-669

SIP 001 - Refactor Superbuild for More Superbuild Projects

Introduction

We wish to add additional projects to the SimpleITK Superbuild to reduce inclusion of third party packages, and to improve the building time and building configuration flexibility. This is based on the request of system packagers to be able to utilize the system packages and reduce the third-party libraries included in SimpleITK's source code. Additionally, we wish to building the SimpleITK library once and then wrapping it multiple times. Specifically, we want to be able to wrap for multiple versions of Python with out having to do a "dirty" build in the same directory.

Comments

Brad Lowekamp: Comments can be made here

Remove ThirdParties

The third-party libraries of Lua and GTest are currently included in the SimpleITK source tree and distribution. This shall be removed from the repository, and become a dependency for the actual ( not Superbuild ) SimpleITK project.

The requirement of now requiring Lua may come as a surprise to users who are not using the Superbuild. They need to be encouraged to switch to use the SimpleITK Superbuild to provide these required dependencies. The Slicer 3D external project script for SimpleITK should serve as an example how a build can be updated to use the Superbuild.