On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 4:08 PM, Benjamin Kirk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I'm not sure about Qhull.  I don't think it's had any releases since 2003.
>> This in itself isn't bad, but from
>> http://www.qhull.org/html/qh-in.htm#library, I see:
>>
>> Warning: Qhull was not designed for calling from other programs. There is
>> neither API nor Qhull classes. It can be done, but it takes work and head
>> scratching. You will need to understand the data structures and read the 
>> code.
>> Most users will find it easier to call Qhull as an external command.
>
> Hmm...  Interestingly, my only exposure to it is through octave-forge and
> matlab with their delaunnay/voronoi algorithms, etc..
>
> And in that case it is certainly being called from another program!
> Although octave might just build up a command and exec it.

Another possibility might be "CGAL" (http://www.cgal.org/).  It was
recommended by one of the viz folks here.  It's a library, so it
should have an API, and be designed to be called from other programs.
It's written in C++ and has a number of convex hull algorithms
(http://www.cgal.org/Manual/3.3/doc_html/cgal_manual/packages.html#Part:ConvexHullAlgorithms)
built in.  It even has a set of python bindings called CGAL-Python
(http://cgal-python.gforge.inria.fr/)!

Distributing it with libmesh will be a little tricky.  Besides just
its sheer size (find ./ -name "*.cpp" | wc -l returns 610) parts (some
basic building blocks) of the library are LGPL while others are QPL.
A QPL library requires any code using it to also be released under a
QPL-compatible license, and the GPL is not compatible.  CGAL is in the
Debian non-free repository, however, so that could work well with the
libmesh debian package...

-- 
John

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