The following comments are intended for core gdcm developpers.


* Python related section.
  Depending on the automake/autoconf/autogen.sh flags you used gdcm could
  be wrapped in two ways:
  - the first python wrappers of gdcm use Swig (http://www.swig.org). They
    are the ones generated when using autogen.sh --enable-python. 
    The entry point is here the file gdcmPython/gdcm.i which uses the
    Swig synthax. As the last lines of this file (the ones starting
    with the %include directive) only some classes are wrapped for python.
    In theory only the library interface (basically the classes gdcmHeader
    and gdcmFile) should be wrapped, but the time being some additional
    classes are added (just to make sure those classes are Swig compatible:
    swig is here used as some lint checker!?).
    Since gdcm is written in C++, Swig will produce two different outups:
      -- some C based low level wrapper (see gdcmPython/gdcm_wrap.c)
      -- some Python based object oriented so called "shadow classes" (see
         file gdcmPython/gdcm.py)
    We also added the file gdcmPython/__init__.py which is the one that
    actually gets loaded when ones uses the gdcmPython Python package.
    The file __init__.py loads the swig generated shadow classes (gdcm.py)
    but will only re-export the interface of gdcm which correponds to
    the lines :
       gdcmHeader = gdcm.gdcmHeader
       gdcmDictSet = gdcm.gdcmDictSet
       gdcmFile = gdcm.gdcmFile
    Hence this whole Swig wrapping process is quite odd since we shall
    wrap more classes (%include in swig.i) than eventually exported to
    the final user by gdcmPython/__init__.py.
  - the second python wrappers use the vtk (http://public.kitware.com/VTK/)
    native wrappers i.e. the binary vtkWrapPython. But it should be noticed
    that the purpous is here a bit different than the one of the Swig
    generated Python wrappers. When using vtkWrapPython the goal is to
    wrap a single vtk class namely vtkGdcmReader as defined in files
    in vtk/vtkGdcmReader.h vtk/vtkGdcmReader.cxx (and of course those
    files are hand made vtk oriented wrappers of gdcm).
    Those wrappers are the one generated when using
       autogen.sh --enable-python --enable-vtk
  - In order to understand the difference between both wrappers you should 
    compare both demo scripts gdcmPython/demo/vtkGdcmDemo.py and
    gdcmPython/demo/vtkGdcmReader.py. The first one only uses the
    Swig wraped classes ("from gdcmPython import gdcmHeader') as opposed
    to vtkGdcmReader.py which also uses vtkWrapPython wraped classes
    ("from gdcmPython.vtkgdcmPython import *").