Documentation/Labs/Slicer5-roadmap

The major version number upgrade to 5 provides an opportunity to make changes that affect the application, the API, or the code in a way that was not possible in the past seven or so years.

This page collects the major changes that the community suggests for Slicer 5.0.

• Remove deprecated modules
  • Editor: The module already directs users to Segment Editor, which provides all the functionality of Editor and more, and is the successor module that will be improved and maintained. Removing it would decrease confusion of both old and new Slicer users
    • Potentially the hack about modules with names ending with the string "Lib" can also be removed after the Editor module will not require it. It is around here.
  • MultiVolumeRendering: A module that was effectively not developed since 2012, and is not currently compiled with Slicer.
  • Model to Label Map: Has too many limitations and bugs (cannot handle concave structures, can cause Slicer to hang or crash, etc.), and is not maintained any more. It might be better to remove it than to fix it, especially that there is an algorithm for the same thing in Slicer that works much better
    • The model node to labelmap node conversion feature could be added as a subject hierarchy plugin, if the route via segmentation node is not convenient enough

• Indentation of curly braces: In Slicer the curly braces have a two-space indentation everywhere within functions. As this was inherited from VTK, but VTK changed its convention to align the braces with the statements (if etc.), it could make sense to make the change in Slicer too. This is considered a major change because it affects almost all cxx files.

• SceneViews: The scene views feature does not work well for a long time now, and there is no consensus about what should be the scope it supports
  • Suggestion: Support only display and hierarchy nodes. Make SceneViews as stable as possible for these cases and remove support for data notes etc.

• Undo/Redo: Similarly to SceneViews, it is a great feature but in time it started breaking. Need to decide if we want to keep it, and if yes fix it.

• Remove self-test modules from the All modules list. Users already find the all modules list very long, and as the self tests are for developers only (and can be found in the modules list under the Testing category), they could be removed from the list.