[Paraview] [ParaView] Unofficial ParaView 4.1.0 SDK for Windows 32 and 64-bit

[Robert Maynard]

This is really cool! We should try to integrate the open mpi changes
as those seem really reasonable.


As far as building Qt, this is required for two reasons. The first is
that the Qt 4.8 series only has 32bit official binaries for windows,
and we would need 32 and 64bit. If we moved to Qt 5.X it would be
possible to use the official binaries, as long as moved to VS
2010/2012.

Now the reason that we currently build with VS 2008 is because of hard
requirements in the python build system. I know that people are
investigating a new build system for python that supports VS 2010 /
VS2012.  So if ParaView is ever able to use the new python build
system, and officially moves over to Qt 5.X we should transition to
use the official Qt binaries for windows.

On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 8:59 AM, Bruno Santos
<bruno.santos at bluecape.com.pt> wrote:
> Greetings to all!
>
> We at blueCAPE have made available an unofficial SDK of ParaView 4.1.0 for
> Windows 32 and 64-bit, based on the official SuperBuild and respective build
> options. It's available here:
> https://code.google.com/p/unofficial-paraview-dev-install/wiki/Downloads#ParaView_4.1.0
> Instructions on how these packages were built is provided here:
> https://code.google.com/p/unofficial-paraview-dev-install/wiki/Notes410
>
> According to our tests, it's possible to use this SDK to build plug-ins and
> any other associated applications, which will work with the respective
> official ParaView 4.1.0 builds for Windows. A proof of concept we've used is
> the vtkPOFFReader plug-in which was successfully built with these SDK
> packages:
> https://code.google.com/p/unofficial-paraview-dev-install/wiki/vtkPOFFReaderBuilds
>
> Note: We roughly used the same development environment as the original
> ParaView 4.1.0 binaries for Windows:
> http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_Binaries - although we've used MSVC
> 2008 C++ Express and did not have a respective FORTRAN compiler (which
> requires the Professional version either way), which is why we needed to do
> some adjustments to build Open-MPI with success.
>
> Furthermore, here's a bit of a back story and the current status of this
> endeavour:
>
> Back in January 2012 we at blueCAPE began to try to bring back the
> development installers of ParaView for Windows, which was last officially
> available for ParaView 3.8.1.
> The overall features available in the development installers we created were
> still missing important files, because we were still basing ourselves on the
> infrastructure that was still remnant from ParaView 3.8.1.
> Nonetheless, we made available our findings and builds for ParaView 3.12.0,
> 3.14.0, 3.14.1 and 3.98.0, where the last release we managed to build was
> back in January 2013.
> ParaView fortunately kept evolving since then. We missed the versions 3.98.1
> and 4.0.1, due to time constraints on our side and a few failed builds.
> As far as we can see, ParaView 4.1.0 already has a pretty good SDK structure
> which evolved overtime. The official SuperBuild repository also already
> provides many of the necessary features for making the SDK releases, at
> least for the Unix-like environments.
> This Summer 2014 we at blueCAPE finally managed to get around back to trying
> and adjust the SuperBuild settings to build and deliver a ParaView 4.1.0 SDK
> for Windows and believe we have successfully achieved it. The changes have
> been shared and referenced in the following wiki page at our project:
> https://code.google.com/p/unofficial-paraview-dev-install/wiki/Notes410
> In addition to this, after some reviewing and building tests with the latest
> commits on the master branch from the SuperBuild repository, we have adapted
> most of the changes we've developed for the SDK build above and have
> submitted two commits to Kitware Gerrit, namely:
>
> http://review.source.kitware.com/#/t/4487/
> http://review.source.kitware.com/#/t/4488/
>
> We haven't managed to create the NSIS and ZIP packages through CMake/CPack,
> but our main concern has mostly been on having a working SDK.
>
> Hopefully this can help bring sooner the ParaView SDK in future versions in
> a more official way... so that we won't have to look into generating the
> NSIS/ZIP packages ourselves, nor build Qt 4.8.6 ;)
>
> If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask!
>
> Best regards,
> Bruno Santos
>
> PS: I haven't sent this email to the ParaView Developers mailing list simply
> because previous emails I've sent on this topic have been to this main
> mailing list.
>
>
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