Bug#637397: Possible solutions

[Sylvestre Ledru]

Le dimanche 28 août 2011 à 17:30 +0200, Mathieu Malaterre a écrit :
> On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Sylvestre Ledru <sylvestre at debian.org> wrote:
> > Le samedi 27 août 2011 à 13:31 +0300, Anton Gladky a écrit :
> >> I see only 2 opportunities to fix it:
> >>   1) Disable python-support in paraview;
> >>   2) Claim, that paraview conflicts with python-vtk;
> > 3) get in touch with upstream and ask them to consider changing the name
> > of the binary.
> 
> paraview-python is clearly in violation with §4.13
> 
> http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#s-embeddedfiles
> 
> It was tolerated that paraview be build with the convenient VTK
> library, but now the package are now installing vtk related tools
> (tools that are already installed by VTK-* package), eg:
> 
> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debian-science/packages/paraview.git;a=blob;f=debian/paraview-python.install;h=8eacd2f050f81c46a1657e75879af9681b67ee22;hb=HEAD
> 
> I still do not understand why this is done ?
I am not the one who packaged paraview initially.

To my opinion, there are several reasons it has been done this way:
* if the vtk version differs from the one needed from paraview, there is
no need to patch the software to manage the new release (I don't know if
there is many differences between the versions)
* if the embedded version of VTK is patched for paraview usages, it is
hard to backport the patches into the vtk libraries...
* it is the lazy way :) and developers are lazy...

Anyway, these reasons are not blocker. We should work on the paraview
packaging to stop doing it. It will also greatly improve build time of
paraview (which takes a very long time).

Mathieu, are you aware of an option of paraview like
--do-not-use-embedded-vtk-but-please-use-the-one-from-the-distro ?

Thank,
Sylvestre