[vtk-developers] PythonCore module removal

[David Lonie]

Hi David,

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 3:34 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
> This just depends on python, right?  Not the python wrappers?
> So it could do its own find_package(PythonLibs REQUIRED)
> and set up the include_directories and link_libraries, completely
> independent of the wrappers.  I'm not saying it would be easy...
> some important things like the generation of vtkPythonConfigure.h
> and choosing between the release & debug versions of the python
> library are tied up with wrapping and would need to be refactored.

Right, this doesn't need access to any of the wrapping code, just
python. I wanted to see if it made sense to split out the PythonCore
module as something that could be shared between VTK modules and the
wrapping code. I noticed that quite a bit of setup is done in the
PythonCore headers, as you mention, and I'd like to avoid having to
replicate/maintain this in another spot. Could this split be easily
done? Or is most of the setup in vtkPython.h et al. legacy code that
wouldn't be needed?

> Are you sure the class should have an innocuous name like
> "vtkMathTextUtilities" when it requires python, matplotlib, and
> (I'm guessing) latex in order to work?

Surprisingly, there is no latex dependency. The matplotlib.mathtext
module actually replicates the core tex typesetting algorithms. This
work is still very early stage, we're just trying to get the
dependencies set up right first. The name of the class mimics
vtkFreeTypeUtilities, and I'd like to eventually replicate most of the
API from FreeType.

Dave