[Paraview] ParaView Environment Variables

[Bill Sherman]

Hello all,

Perhaps an odd question -- I'm wondering what important environment
variables are associated with ParaView, and in some cases what they
do.

I ask because for an installation of ParaView on an HPC system, I
am creating a traditional man-page.  And one of the traditional
sections of man pages for applications is "ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES".

I happened to find that NERSC had previously done a similar thing,
but based on the command line arguments as well as the environment
variables it gives no longer in existence, it would seem that this
is from a rather old version of ParaView, so I'm basically starting
from scratch.

Searching through the source for "getenv", I found several refernces
to environment variables, and I'd like to get advice on what should/
should not be included.

So there are a couple of categories the environment variables can
be classified as.

1) ParaView specific variables:
	- PV_ICET_WINDOW_BORDERS
	- PARAVIEW_DATA_ROOT
	- PV_NO_OFFSCREEN_SCREENSHOTS

So I know what the first of those does, and I had an assumption of
what the second one (PARAVIEW_DATA_ROOT) does -- but I couldn't find
a way to make it have an effect!  And I can half-guess what the third
one does -- explanations welcome.


2) VTK related variables:
	- VTK_AUTOLOAD_PATH
	- VTK_RENDERER

And I don't really know what either of them do.


3) Generic environment variables that ParaView accesses:
         - DISPLAY
         - HOME
         - HOSTNAME
         - LOGNAME
         - PATH
         - LD_LIBRARY_PATH
         - PWD (VTK/Utilities/KWSys/vtksys/SystemTools.cxx)
         - PYTHONPATH
         - TCL_LIBRARY (vtkTclUtil.cxx)
         - TK_LIBRARY (vtkTclUtil.cxx)
         - R_HOME (vtkRInterface.cxx)
         - COLUMNS (VTK/Utilities/KWSys/vtksys/SystemTools.cxx)
         - APPDATA -- for MS-Windows only?
         - COMMON_APPDATA -- for MS-Windows only?

So I don't know that I'd need to include those as part of a ParaView
man-page.


4) Other variables that are probably just for internal testing:
         - PV_DEBUG_LEAKS_VIEW
         - PV_DEBUG_TEST
         - PV_SETTINGS_DEBUG
         - PV_PLUGIN_DEBUG
         - PV_PLUGIN_PATH
         - DASHBOARD_TEST_FROM_CTEST
         - DART_TEST_FROM_DART
         - VERBOSE_TESTING (Exodus)
         - VERY_VERBOSE_TESTING (Exodus)
         - FLIP_CAM_MANIP (Interactor Style Unicam)
         - VTK_MATPLOTLIB_DEBUG (vtkMatplotlibMathTextUtilities.cxx)
         - QT_MAC_NO_NATIVE_MENUBAR 
(ThirdParty/QtTesting/vtkqttesting/pqTestUtility.cxx)

Again, probably wouldn't include these in a man-page, unless they are
something the end-user could possibly want to affect.


Happy to share the man-page when I'm done.

	Thanks,
	Bill

--
Bill Sherman
Sr. Technology Advisor
Advanced Visualization Lab
Pervasive Technology Inst
Indiana University
shermanw at indiana.edu