Bug#959387: [Re] paraview-dev: missing cmake vtk modules in the dev package, cannot use

[Jakob Meng]

Hello Anton,
that is great news! Keeping VTK and ParaView in sync' is not going to be
easy:

Sync'ing VTK sources and ParaView's VTK sources and allowing both to be
co-installable, increases the maintenance burden for both package
maintainers. Especially for Alastair McKinstry, because he would have to
copy and adapt all patches from (Debian's) VTK package sources to his
ParaView VTK sources.

Latest ParaView release is 5.8.1 [1] and that is using a pre-VTK9
development version of VTK [2][3] ?!? The master branch of next ParaView
release [4] has VTK 9 [5]. ParaView's release tarballs are published
without the VTK subfolder [6], but I am not sure whether that is due to
a "bug" [7] of the GitHub release process or if that means it is valid
to "mix" different ParaView and VTK releases.

ParaView CMakeLists.txt uses VTK's CMake files [8] before considering
PARAVIEW_USE_EXTERNAL_VTK [9], hence ParaView requires the VTK
subdirectory to be present anyway.

For Debian users, it would be beneficial to have VTK and ParaView
packages in sync and possibly installed at the same time, because that
enables them e.g.
1. run (i)python3 or pvpython and enter 'import vtk' without crashs
2. use find_package(VTK) and find_package(ParaView) in a single
CMakeLists.txt without tedious if-else constructs

[1] https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/-/tree/v5.8.1
[2]
https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/-/commit/ce73a508883c599927967be854ecfbf1562f032f
[3]
https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-/blob/da522f73bc0639f8c995b8c89e21d604656f99e2/CMake/vtkVersion.cmake
[4] https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview
[5]
https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-/blob/ae3f586abc4032895ce05e664d4a6ad84f990ef2/CMake/vtkVersion.cmake
[6] https://github.com/Kitware/ParaView/releases
[7] https://stackoverflow.com/a/34721233/6490710
[8] https://github.com/Kitware/ParaView/blob/v5.8.1/CMakeLists.txt#L98
[9] https://github.com/Kitware/ParaView/blob/v5.8.1/CMakeLists.txt#L218

Best regards
Jakob


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