Re: Skip VTK7 and go directly VTK8? Was: Re: vtk6 and vtk7

From: "Ghislain Vaillant" <ghisvail@gmail.com>
To: "Nico Schlömer" <nico.schloemer@gmail.com>, "Gert Wollny" <gw.fossdev@gmail.com>
Cc: dparsons@debian.org, "Debian Science List" <debian-science@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2017 5:12:20 PM
Subject: Re: Skip VTK7 and go directly VTK8? Was: Re: vtk6 and vtk7

Or perhaps upstream should re-think its release strategy. How do they expect the scientific community to keep up with so frequent major versions, I wonder? Anyway.
Meanwhile, let's keep in mind that our distribution of VTK packages is here to serve existing packages making use of it (such as Paraview for instance). Unless one of these packages suddenly requires a minimum VTK version higher than 7, there is no urgency in providing more up-to-date versions.

There is a wrong statement here. VTK is actually not used at all for building Paraview.

The situation is even more complex as Paraview ships a VTK version (eg. 8.0 for paraview 5.4.1) and

as the actual paraview-python 5.4.1 requires python-vtk6 which is a non-sense!!!

Providing very few changes to paraview package any package using VTK can be built on top of ParaView.

There is indeed here a big question of strategy. What shall be done?

Push upstream (or try on our own) to fix ParaView installation to force use of VTK to build ParaView?

Or provide an alternative VTK through ParaView (in which case, for instance, we have already a vtk 8.0 ready to be used)?

Sorry to jump into this discussion but I really think that some work is needed for ParaView/VTK, at least to clarify the question of VTK version?

Best

Ghis

Le 25/11/17 à 15:27, Nico Schlömer a écrit :
Thanks Gert for the ping; hopfully they'll get to it soon.

On a related note, VTK has bumped its version to 9.0.0 in master [1], so it looks like soon we'll have to catch up with three (!) major versions. (Perhaps we'll have to rethink how we package vtk for debian.)

Cheers,
Nico

[1] https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/commit/43ce9dd8f81c2275515f84e7ce2395d8812dcd0d

On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 10:44 AM Gert Wollny <gw.fossdev@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello Nico,

Am Dienstag, den 07.11.2017, 13:12 +0000 schrieb Nico Schlömer:
> VTK7 is in NEW for two months again with no indication of when it
> will be through.
Well it is a big package, and it came also with an ITP.

> I need VTK for my work and would like to start tweaking the package,
> especially since xdmf3 landed in d/copyright::Files-Excluded. (No
> idea why.)

This is there for some time already, longer then I have been touching
this package, but for some reason it is not enabled to use the system
version neither, I think there is some bug.

> I'm not sure if it's a good idea to mess with the package while in
> NEW though. What do you usually do in such situations?
If I just need the packages for myself, then I create a local version
that might be uploaded as soon as the pakage has cleared the NEW
pipeline.

Anyway, I'll ping the FTP-master that rejected it the first time.

Best,
Gert