[Paraview] paraview and vtk

[Brad King]

Weiguang Guan wrote:
> I'm new to paraview. Just wonder why paraview keeps its own copy of vtk.  
> If I download/install vtk, and want to link with the separately installed 
> vtk rather than the one that comes with paraview, is there a switch in 
> cmake (paraview's CMakeLists.txt) that allow me to do this?

ParaView used to support an external VTK but it requires VTK to be built 
with a specific set of options.  It also requires a matching version of 
VTK (down to the second in CVS time).  We had too many problems with 
users not having matching versios of VTK or building it with conflicting 
options or compilers.  The solution is to include VTK with ParaView to 
make it all do the right thing automatically.  It turns out that only a 
minimal part of VTK needs to be built and that ParaView's VTK wouldn't 
be that useful as a stand-alone VTK anyway.

-Brad