[Insight-users] Kd-tree implementation in ITK is buggy and unreliable

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Ali,


             Thanks for your angry email !


There is nothing better than an energetic rage-saturated
message for waking us up on a Tuesday morning !


(Today is Tuesday, isn't it ?)


To start with, I had to get more coffee to complete the
calculation that half a decade is actually five years...

You were worrying me at first, but now I have to admit that
reporting bug's lifespan in units of decades is definitely
an effective scare tactic to call attention to the problem.
That was a very clever choice of words!.


You see, at that lifespan scale we will have to stop calling
them bugs, and refer to them as cicadas.   :-)

Ok... ( geek joke == bad joke ).



...Anyways...


I share your philosophical conundrum:


       "Why is that this bug has not been fixed ?"


It is indeed a deep philosophical question worthy of reflexion
and consideration.


After meditating over this difficult issue, and consulting
several experts on socio-economical matters, a couple of
foreign policy observers, two Buddhist priests and a Lama
I have arrived to the unavoidable answer:


                       Destiny !


The solution of this bug has been retained by the Gods in
anticipation for the events that will trigger the prophetic
sequence of actions that will result in the modification
of the source code used in the Kd-Tree.


The event that we all have been prophetically waiting for,
is without a doubt:

                      Your email !


Angry users are the fuel that propels the progress of software
engineering. Without angry users, we will all be using Microsoft
products. Without angry-user-attitude Richard Stallman would
have not been pissed-off with that Xerox printer and its
closed-source drivers, and would have never started the
Free Software movement.
[http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch02.html]



              In this Tuesday morning,
              you have showed us the Way !


Angry and vocal users are the strength of Democracy and Freedom.
Whe users say:  "Enough is enough!", then developers will listen.
and if developers don't listen, users are still empowered to fix
the problems on their own. After all, that's the ultimate power
of Open Source.


We must celebrate today your epic expression of dissatisfaction,
and respond to it by letting the prophecy unchain the actions
that will modify the source code of the Kd-tree.



We need more users with your angry attitude,
because otherwise:


             "When users go silent,
              software goes bad."





       Regards,


           Luis



--------------
Ali - wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A quick search in the mailing list shows that, during the past half a decade, it has been reported many times that the kd-tree classes in ITK are buggy. Writing some library based on ITK, it took me a few days to find out that the bug in my library is actually introduced by the kd-tree implementation in ITK which FINDS THE WRONG NEAREST NEIGHBOUR.
> 
> I have no idea, against many warnings from the users, why the bug has not been resolved yet. In the case it is difficult to address the bug, one option is to wrap many other existing implementations, personally I switched to libkdtree++.
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