[Paraview] Building ParaView v5.1.2 on Linux from source with support for GPU and SWR.

[Ben Boeckel]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 10:06:15 +0200, Albina, Frank wrote:
> In this regard, I would like to point out a few things I have found
> while performing the build process on the aforementioned Linux
> distribution. Note that my incentive is to help improve the ParaView
> software suite as well as helping others to be able to build and use
> the software.

Thanks for the feedback. Responses inline.

> 2.     You definitely need cmake at least cmake v3.5 (and not v3.3) to
> compile ParaView from SuperBuild.

Ah, ParaView is 3.3, but the superbuild is 3.5. As a heads up, the new
superbuild which will be used for ParaView 5.2 will require at least
3.6.1.

> 3.     You need a GNU compiler v4.8.0 or above to build. My Linux
> distribution comes with gcc v4.7.2. Fortunately, I had gcc v4.9.2
> installed with which I could perform a successful build.

What subproject required this?

> 4.     Dependencies such libsz, libxml, libbzip2 are built and stored
> in the <build>/install/lib64 directory on my platform. This creates
> linking issues which I could partly resolve by pushing the missing
> libraries into the <build>/install/lib directory. This is not ideal
> but could be solved by forcing the lib directory to
> <build>/install/lib using the --libdir option.

Hrm. I'm on Fedora (which also uses lib64) and though I had gotten all
the lib64-isms out of the superbuild. Maybe I had missed some before
5.1.2 (the superbuild now uses common infrastructure shared between
other similar superbuilds).

> 5.     The vistrails plugin cannot be built. After 3 attempts, the git
> clone from https://kwgitlab.kitware.com/paraview/vistrails.git fails.
> Either the link is wrong or the server is unreachable.

vistrails should be hidden behind a "USE_NONFREE_COMPONENTS" flag.
vistrails (and acusolve) are not FOSS, so their git repos are on our
internal server.

> 6.     The mesa libraries are pre-compiled and downloaded to
> <buils>/mesa-downloads. They are unpacked and moved into the ParaView
> installation directory when performing “make install”. These libraries
> are dating from May 3rd, hence prior to the release of Mesa 12.0 which
> embeds OpenSWR as a build option. Is there a way to build new libGL.so
> and libOSMesa.so libraries based on Mesa3D v12.0 and replace the
> currently pre-compiled binaries? If so,what are the typical
> configuration options used in this case?

The new superbuild has support for building mesa 12.0.3 as part of the
build. We used prebuilt binaries before because our build machine was
Debian 6 which was not easily capable of compiling the LLVM -> Mesa
chain without a self-compiled compiler and such, so it was built once
and that was it. I think it did contain SWR since it was a git snapshot.
Utkarsh?

--Ben