[Insight-users] ITK Fedora package: bumping up utilities

[Mario Ceresa]

Hello everybody,
First of all, I hope that everyone of you spent Merry Christmas holidays!

Then, I saw that support for Itk continued even for the 25 night, so I
won't feel terribly guilty asking for help now :)

With the help of one of Fedora reviewers, Peter, who is following us
in CC, I'm trying to build Itk using fedora packaged libraries,
instead of the ones included in the Utilities source tree. If a
library in Utilities is related to medical image processing and under
active development, but has not already been packaged, we'll try to
package it as well if possible.

For some utilities such as libxml2, png, tiff, zlib, vxl and gdcm
there is the possibility to set cmake to use system libraries. For the
others that have no such an option, we'd like to add, if possible.

In this process I encountered a couple of problems: the first one is
that sometimes the bundled version is not the more up-to-date one, and
that sometimes I don't understand if the library has been modified in
order to be plugged into itk or not.

Here is a (in)complete list of what I found:

1) DICOMParser
Bundled: revision 1.1, date 23 October 2003
Updated: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dicomparser/files/   date: 19
January 2005

2) NrrdIO
As far as I understand this is a subset of teem, to read nrrd files.
Could be possible/useful/beneficial for itk to use the updated nrrd
part of the teen library? if so I might work on a patch.

3) expat
Bundled: seems to be version 1.95.6 date 22 July 2003
Updated: http://sourceforge.net/projects/expat/files/
date: 7 June 2007

Why do you need libxml2 if you ship expat?

4) gdcm
Bundled: seems to be a modified version 1.2.2
Updated: version 2.0.14 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/gdcm/files/
Again, if you think it might be useful or even possible to rebase itk
on gdcm 2.0.14, I might work on a patch.

5) itkExtHdrs
seems to be related to Analyze file format. Did you develop all the
code inside ITK?

6) libjpeg
Bundled: version 6b
Packaged: version 6b
I see from the readme files that some modification occurred in order
to adapt it to both VTK and ITK. Do you think that it might be
possible to link ITK to the original version?

7) slatec
seems to be a subset of the fnlib. But I might be wrong. Can anyone
please confirm?

8) nifti
Bundled: version 1.1.0
There is an Updates.txt file in the source dir which is more recent
than the others. Are these manually made modifications of the original
sources?

9) openjpeg
Packaged version is 1.3 from May 2009
Bundled version seems a bit older (January 2007)

It will be a lot of work to make all these changes but I think that it
might be beneficial for both Itk and Fedora: the former could use
newer version of the libraries whenever they are available and
Fedora/RedHat could have more medical image processing package
available.

I'm sorry if I'm asking information that are available elsewhere but I
googled for a while without too much success. In case, just pointing
me to the correct link will be perfect.

Thanks for any comment on the viability/foolness of this idea, or any
clarifications to the above questions,

Regards,

Mario