2012/3/18 Stéfan van der Walt <stefan@sun.ac.za>

Hey, Tony

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Tony Yu <tsyu80@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Possible Con ------------------------ Someone mentioned a while back that it would be a good idea to keep skimage focused on the basic toolset, and then a separate package could build off of it.

Counter-argument: This infrastructure (so far, at least) is fairly lightweight, and I imagine the biggest area of growth would be the plugins---most of which would just provide an interactive interface to skimage functions.

This is the way I see it too: one of skimage's most important contributions is to provide an easily-accessible Python platform for building image processing solutions. This exactly means having good pipelines, good display, and all the tools needed to build a complete solution. Some of the algorithms may be obtained from elsewhere (e.g., opencv)--but even so, building a solution using those packages is currently still a pain. So, I see the construction of these basic tools and building blocks as a fundamental part of what we're trying to do.

...

Counter-argument: skimage would provide the simplest possible interface for adding interactivity (taking advantage of Matplotlib tools for plotting histograms, etc and its support for multiple gui toolkits). A separate project would be ideal for gui-toolkit--specific viewers (which could potentially be significantly fast) since it would likely take more code to do some of these things (I could be wrong about this). Also, I assume more people using skimage would know matplotlib over any specific backend.

I think from the start we assumed that we'd be building tools on Matplotlib and Qt. If something better comes along, we should consider it--of course--but in the meantime it still seems like a reasonable choice. If the plugin infrastructure can be improved to make it easier to build external tools, I'm also all for that.

...

I'd like to come to some sort of consensus, if possible, so please---if you *any* opinions on this---let your voice be heard.

I guess my opinion is obvious, but for the record: I'd love to include this work directly as part of skimage. But, if that's not to be, I still encourage it whole-heartedly!

Stéfan

Since there weren't any objections, I added a new `viewer` subpackage in PR 165 <https://github.com/scikits-image/scikits-image/pull/165>. Sorry for the big commit: the full commit history can be found in another repo <https://github.com/tonysyu/skloupe>. The main parts are the viewer base classes<https://github.com/tonysyu/scikits-image/blob/mpl-viewer/skimage/viewer/view...> and the plugin base class<https://github.com/tonysyu/scikits-image/blob/mpl-viewer/skimage/viewer/plug...>. The rest of the code just demonstrates what this backbone allows. If nothing else, you can play around with the examples<https://github.com/tonysyu/scikits-image/tree/mpl-viewer/examples> . I plan on adding some sort of "How to write a custom Plugin" documentation, but Guillaume didn't seem to have much trouble writing a ContrastSetter plugin even without that :) Cheers, -Tony