[vtk-developers] VTK installation: shell scripts for env vars

[David Gobbi]

I've recently started playing with the KWWidgets packages, and it has 
this very nice feature that it creates shell scripts that set PATH, 
TCLLIBPATH, and PYTHONPATH to make it very easy to use VTK and KWWidgets 
directly from the build tree.

It would be great if VTK would also produce similar scripts.  Right now 
VTK creates "vtk" and "vtkpython" executables that have the paths built 
in, but I prefer to use the stock "wish" and "python" that come with the 
system.

To be complete, these scripts will also have to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH 
for people like me who don't like rpath.  This is a challenging thing to 
do, since the library path variable has different names on different 
unices.  I've already written some CMake code that does most of the 
work, but hit a brick wall when trying to figure out whether 
LD_LIBRARYN32_PATH or LD_LIBRARY64_PATH should be used on IRIX.  Setting 
both doesn't work, it breaks the system if 64-bit .so files are in the 
LD_LIBRARYN32_PATH or vice versa.  The only reliable way to check is to 
use the compiler to build a test executable, and then somehow look into 
that executable to test what kind of binary it is, and the test is going 
to vary from platform to platform.

Are there other people who think that having CMake figure out the 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH would be valuable?  Even though it is a complicated 
thing to do, it is certainly doable.

 - David