[Paraview] Can a collaborative client share a pipeline without creating a view itself?

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

> If collaboration is experimental in ParaView, I'd say so in the very beginning of any article documenting or blogging about those functions. Still, in an experimental feature, there should be suffiecient interest to fix bugs, or "unsupported" would be a better term.

Makes sense. Note that there's nothing new that has popped up about
collaboration since 2012. Then, it wasn't experimental..over time due
to lack of use and continuous iterations to avoid deteriorations now I
would, personally, consider it experimental. Also, I vaguely remember
saying so in the very first emails about this. Maybe I remember it
wrong. In fact, I am

> One problem I see with the (free, of course) help in this mailing list is that one never knows whether someone is still considering the problems adressed in the list after a week or so. Often I see problems half solved,but the remaining - hard - problem is then silently ignored. I assume that you communicate internally who is assigned which question, given that you consider them worthwile at all, so that not two people work on the same. Just a suggestion, could you send a short "I'll look into this", and, more importantly "Sorry, we can't solve this problem"? It is much better to know that one has to go another path than sitting and wait and maybe ask again and again because nobody dares to say that there is no solution for a problem that seemed easy in the beginning.

While that makes sense, I am not sure there's anyway of enforcing
that. No, we don't have internally communications about who's
answering what. Mailing lists are community driven. Community extends
beyond just Kitware. Things get dropped not because no one dares to
say there's no solution, but firstly, because people are busy. I often
see emails with "not supported yet", "it's a bug, please report it"
etc. etc. And secondly, because community is a two way street. Being
human, I would be more inclined to help someone out who's helped the
community out before. If someone keeps asking time consuming questions
over and over again without contributing back to the community much, I
think one can be forgiven to prioritize responding to that question
below others. Thirdly, mailing lists are not akin to "customer
support" in traditional sense. There are paid services
(http://www.kitware.com/products/consulting.html) for that.

Going back to your collaboration issue, I can try to see if I can
reproduce it in near future -- but I really can't guarantee when. Much
to my dismay, there are way too many things on my todo list.