[vtk-developers] Some progress on binary wheel for OSX

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

Just to say, I did a few hours of hacking and investigation, which got
me reasonably close to a copy of VTK that could be used for a very
useful OSX binary installer - full description at:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig/2016-July/024137.html

As y'all know, the current OSX installer isn't much use for doing real
work, because it ships its own copy of Python, making it difficult to
install other Python packages for doing standard things like array
manipulation, statistics and so on.

The ideal would be to be able to build a binary wheel [1] for OSX, so
the user could do:

    pip install vtk

to install a copy of vtk into the Python environment they are using -
such as Python.org Python, homebrew, etc.  This has already been done
for nearly all the main scientific Python projects such as numpy,
scipy, matplotlib etc.

The big hold-up for VTK, is the current behavior of VTK / cmake, to
link the Python library by absolute path directly into the VTK libs,
so the build is tied to the path of the Python binary [2, 3].

I see there's a pull request already in from the homebrew folks to try
and fix that [4] - which is excellent news.   I believe that, once
this is merged and released, it should be fairly easy to build an OSX
wheel that would work in any standard OSX Python environment, which
would be a huge step forward in terms of ease of the install process.

Cheers,

Matthew

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/
[2] http://blog.tim-smith.us/2015/09/python-extension-modules-os-x/
[3] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-science/issues/3401
[4] https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/merge_requests/1511