Revision as of 17:35, 3 March 2012

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Hypothesis

When building application on the top of our toolkits: VTK, ITK, etc ..

.... we usually rely on the CMake variable named: VTK_LIBRARIES, ITK_LIBRARIES, ...

This implies that every targets linked using these variables will be linked against the complete list of libraries.

While working on issue associated with ITK_AUTOLOAD_FACTORY, I noticed that using tool like ldd was systematically listing all VTK and ITK libraries to list dependency of a custom factory. Using the "-u" flag helps to find out which library are not direct dependency ... doing so just doesn't "feel" right and make the all process tedious and time consuming.

Then, instead of trying to work around the "issue", I decided to communicate with the rest of the team to get a better understanding of what we should be doing and, by extension, what we should be recommending to developers outside Kitware.

Should we avoid the use of {VTK,ITK}_LIBRARIES and specify dependency explicitly when developing libraries depending on these toolkit ?

Should we update VTK, ITK, ... build system to understand the COMPONENT parameters of find_package ? [Not sure if it already works that way]

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 = Hypothesis =
 When building application on the top of our toolkits: VTK, ITK, etc ..
-       .... we usually rely on the CMake variable named: VTK_LIBRARIES, ITK_LIBRARIES, ...
+.... we usually rely on the CMake variable named: VTK_LIBRARIES, ITK_LIBRARIES, ...