Hello Alastair,
this morning I received the request to make VisIt available on a bunch of
Debian (Jessie at the moment, but perhaps Stretch too within a few months)
machines, by one of our brightest scientists. I simply cannot deny this.
Incidentally, I had started to try to package VisIt (2.12.3) myself, starting
with the "official" build script and a pbuilder with "--usenetwork yes".
I had added a number of build dependencies, only to fail at the VTK build
stage. It turned out that the Xt was missing, but I didn't pursue this any
further because I had spotted your IFP/RFP (bug #395573)...
So I went ahead and cloned your debian-build git repository - only to find
that the last version possibly supported would have been 2.9... I used that
debian/ tree to build my own, still with 2.12.3 in mind, and gradually added
build-depends. I'm stuck now because something in the build process thinks
it would be nice to have python3 support, but there is no python3-vtk6, and
that's it. Is it, really? (This seems to be connected to the change that
included python3 into python-all-dev. Why there's no python3-vtk6, I don't
know, there seems to be no easy way to create one.)
I found that Ole Streicher had already asked for the status of the project
but didn't get a (public) answer. Perhaps I'm luckier. May I learn what
stopped you from working on this build, and what your suggestions are?
For now, I'll continue to iterate over the missing X libraries, perhaps
I'll be successful in the end. (I won't be happy because this "usenetwork"
setting is a horrible kludge, but on the other hand, the whole VisIt build
process seems to be. I need to accept that, sooner or later.)
Thanks,
Steffen