Hi Steffen, Sorry for taking so long to respond.
Packaging VisIt was delayed waiting for 'the correct VTK' to be packaged for Debian. I also haven't had much time to pay attention to this; I still wish to see VisIt packaged as it is a dependency of CDAT which I'd like to see in Debian.
Currently VTK6 is present which should work, with VTK8 being packaged for buster. What branch are you using ? my latest branch (debian/master) should be based off 2.12.3, and refers to python- instead of python3 until python3-vtk? is provided. It doesn't build yet, but I can work with you to get it working.
Best regards Alastair On 06/09/2017 11:17, Steffen Grunewald wrote:
Hello Alastair, this morning I received the request to make VisIt available on a bunch of Debian (Jessie at the moment, but perhaps Stretch too within a few months) machines, by one of our brightest scientists. I simply cannot deny this. Incidentally, I had started to try to package VisIt (2.12.3) myself, starting with the "official" build script and a pbuilder with "--usenetwork yes". I had added a number of build dependencies, only to fail at the VTK build stage. It turned out that the Xt was missing, but I didn't pursue this any further because I had spotted your IFP/RFP (bug #395573)... So I went ahead and cloned your debian-build git repository - only to find that the last version possibly supported would have been 2.9... I used that debian/ tree to build my own, still with 2.12.3 in mind, and gradually added build-depends. I'm stuck now because something in the build process thinks it would be nice to have python3 support, but there is no python3-vtk6, and that's it. Is it, really? (This seems to be connected to the change that included python3 into python-all-dev. Why there's no python3-vtk6, I don't know, there seems to be no easy way to create one.) I found that Ole Streicher had already asked for the status of the project but didn't get a (public) answer. Perhaps I'm luckier. May I learn what stopped you from working on this build, and what your suggestions are? For now, I'll continue to iterate over the missing X libraries, perhaps I'll be successful in the end. (I won't be happy because this "usenetwork" setting is a horrible kludge, but on the other hand, the whole VisIt build process seems to be. I need to accept that, sooner or later.) Thanks, Steffen
