What is this project ?

This project is NOT the official VTK repository.

It is a fork of VTK sources hosted at https://github.com/Kitware/VTK.

The official upstream repository is https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk.

It is used as staging area to maintain and test patches that will be contributed back to the official repository.

What is the branch naming convention ?

Each branch is named following the pattern slicer-vY.Y.Z-YYYY-MM-DD-SHA{7}

where:

• vX.Y.Z is the version of the forked project
• YYYY-MM-DD is the date of the last official commit associated with the branch.
• SHA{9} are the first seven characters of the last official commit associated with the branch.

For more details, see https://www.slicer.org/wiki/Documentation/Nightly/Developers/ProjectForks

How to backport changes to a specific branch ?

1. Fork Slicer/VTK

2. Checkout the relevant slicer-vX.Y.Z-YYYY-MM-DD-SHA{9} branch. See SuperBuild/External_VTK.cmake to identify the name of the branch.

3. Add the remote from which to cherry-pick commit from

4. Cherry-pick the commit(s)

5. Amend the commit updating title and message to include [backport MR-1234] and Cherry-picked commit ... information.

   Adding these details streamlines the creation of new slicer- branch allowing to easily identify which commits are specific to Slicer and which ones have been backported.

   [Backport MR-7480] Simplify coincident topology resolution
       
   See https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-/merge_requests/7480/diffs?commit_id=03e2ac53aba58a0a060d77e12d4893230c146e1b
   
   ...
   

   Or if the change has already been integrated into the upstream repository:

   [backport] Fix infinite loop in vtkContourTriangulator 
   
   Cherry-picked commit a93fff6 from main VTK repository.
   
   ...
   

6. Finally, create a pull request against the relevant slicer-vX.Y.Z-YYYY-MM-DD-SHA{9} branch.

Note: If you have push access to the Slicer/VTK fork, you could directly push commit to the relevant branch

How to update the version of VTK ?

1. Clone this repository and add a remote to the official project

git clone git://github.com/Slicer/VTK
cd VTK
git remote add upstream git://github.com/kitware/VTK
git fetch upstream

2. Create a new branch following the convention

# Extract version from https://github.com/Kitware/VTK/blob/master/CMake/vtkVersion.cmake
XYZ=$(cat CMake/vtkVersion.cmake | grep VERSION | sed -re "s/set\(VTK_[A-Z]+_VERSION (.+)\)/\\1/" | perl -pe 'chomp if eof' | tr '\n' '.')
echo "XYZ [${XYZ}]"

DATE=$(git show -s --format=%ci upstream/master | cut -d" " -f1)
echo "DATE [${DATE}]"

vtkSHA=$(git show -s --format=%h upstream/master)
echo "vtkSHA: [${SHA}]"

BRANCH_NAME=slicer-v${XYZ}-${DATE}-${vtkSHA}
echo "BRANCH_NAME [${BRANCH_NAME}]"

git checkout -b ${BRANCH_NAME} ${vtkSHA}

3. Cherry-pick the Slicer specific commits from last branch. Resolve conflict as needed.

   • the commit hash included in each branch name is the VTK upstream hash, so Slicer specific commits may be viewed with the git range (..) operation:

          git log --pretty=format:"%h" {vtkSHA}..slicer-xyz-{vtkSHA}

4. To test the changes, locally rebuild VTK, CTK and Slicer.

5. Publish the branch. (directly in this repo if you have push rights, or on a fork)

6. Update Slicer VTK external project and submit a pull request.

How to be granted push rights ?

Ask on https://discourse.slicer.org/

Questions

If you have questions, see https://discourse.slicer.org/