[Paraview] Windows plugin compatibility with Paraview

[Ben Boeckel]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 11:08:00 -0600, Chris Marsh wrote:
> I would like to build and make available a pre-compiled windows binary for
> a filter I have developed. I would like to avoid the (windows) user having
> to compile the filter as well as paraview. Therefore I am wondering what
> compiler is used to produce the official Paraview builds so-as to avoid ABI
> issues with my pre-compiled .dll. Is there anything else I need to be aware
> of?

We use Visual Studio 2013 Community to build the binaries from the
superbuild:

    https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview-superbuild

If you want to be compatible with the paraview.org downloads, there are
two packages built, one with MPI and one without. You can see the
command lines used to build the superbuild here:

    https://open.cdash.org/viewConfigure.php?buildid=4740356 (no MPI)
    https://open.cdash.org/viewConfigure.php?buildid=4740247 (with MPI)

Only MSMPI is supported (but cannot be redistributed, so we rely on it
being available on the target machine already).

If you want to build your own package with the plugin pre-packaged, you
can use the documentation here:

    https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview-superbuild/#external-plugins

to support building your plugin and then extract it from the install/
tree and distribute it to your users. We currently do not ship an SDK
for Windows, so it is easiest to build 5.2.0 locally and then
redistribute your plugin (though building your own package is also
easy). Note that your plugin is built as part of ParaView in this
configuration, so there is no need to do a `find_package(ParaView)`. You
can see how the PointSpritePlugin deals with this here:

    https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/blob/4897676d1cdc764f933a9fac22149dadf6dd5cb2/Plugins/PointSprite/CMakeLists.txt#L14

--Ben