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

[Bruno Santos]

Greetings Robert,

Thanks for the feedback!

Then perhaps I should give it a spin to also SuperBuild with Qt 4.8.6 
and provide the changes/hacks necessary to include the Qt SDK in the 
ParaView SDK...

Which reminds me: can the Python version be bumped up at least from 
2.7.3 to 2.7.8 in the next ParaView version? I haven't reported this as 
a feature request nor Gerrit commit for review, since it's possible that 
there is also some other limitation on your side, possibly regarding 
multi-platform compatibility or the same MSVC version issue?

Best regards,
Bruno

On 08-08-2014 15:30, Robert Maynard wrote:
> 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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