[vtkusers] building vtk on AIX with python

[Hank Childs]

> I'm trying to build vtk on AIX, with the python bindings. Has this worked
> for anyone? Ideally I'd like to have the vtk python modules dynamically
> loaded, but statically linking them into python is fine too. So far it's
> unpleasant, if there are any success stories I'd love to hear what
> compiler/flags/hacks were used. Thanks in advance,
> 
> Alvaro

Alvaro,

We also have had a lot of problems with shared libraries on AIX (with VTK
and without VTK).

After much agony, we ended up creating the shared libraries as follows:

First, we don't configure with --enable-shared.

Second, we do a normal make.

Third, we run the following sequence of commands to create the shared
library ourselves (this is straight from our script, so forgive me if it
is a little raw):

cd common
mkdir tmpdir
cd tmpdir
ar -x ../libVTKCommon.a
g++ -shared -o libVTKCommon.so *.o
ar -rc libVTKCommon.a libVTKCommon.so
mv libVTKCommon.a  ..
cd ..
rm -rf tmpdir

We do this for each of the directories/libraries.

Good luck,
Hank

____________________________________________________________________________

Hank Childs
VisIt/MeshTV
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory