[MINC-users] The future of MINC

[Jason Lerch]

Hi Pierre,

>> 
> I see one major advantage to build a reader/writer based on native
> NetCDF/HDF5 libraries : you download the routines and you're done. Nothing
> to compile, no dependency to install. I am curious to see how the NiPY
> community will react to the Python MINC2 IO tool of Jason for example (great
> job BTW, that convinced me to start using python for some projects). It does
> add a dependency on the development MINC libraries. Not a problem for MINC
> developers, but will it make it to the standard distribution of NiBabel ?
> we'll see. In Matlab/Octave I want to avoid compilation if I can. What I
> like about the libminc2 library option (called in MEX) is that it would work
> for both Octave and Matlab. I'll think about it :). In any case, the
> specifications of MINC2 are pretty clean and it is fully HDF5 compliant as
> far as I can see. I thus don't see why taking that route would be a problem
> in principle. You're not the first one telling me that the reader's OK but
> the writer would fail. I haven't tried the writer yet (my reader 90% fine
> and fully fixable I believe) but is there a dirty secret I should know ?

The dirty secret, such as it is, is two-fold as far as I understand it (and I might very well be missing something obvious too).

* while I don't doubt that you can get a correct MINC implementation by making all the appropriate NetCDF and HDF5 calls, the risk of avoiding the MINC libs is that subtly incompatible volumes will be created which we then have to work around in the future. This can be avoided with some care, I'm sure, but has the potential to be tricky.
* the more important one is forward incompatibility. Any desired change to how MINC reads and writes volumes (such as the switch from NetCDF to HDF5) will now have to consistently be coded in more than one place. Having the MINC2 lib not read MINC1 files already leads to enough mayhem, so the thought that going forward different tools will read a different range of MINC files scares me.

So with that in mind we have to make libminc has ubiquitous and easy to install as possible so that a dependency on it causes little penalty. 

Jason