I am building ParaView with an external VTK. Everything looks fine, except that ParaView cannot find the documentation or examples.
I investigated a bit into the function:
std::string vtkPVFileInformation::GetParaViewSharedResourcesDirectory()
{
// Look for where the function "GetVTKVersion." lives.
auto vtk_libs = vtkGetLibraryPathForSymbol(GetVTKVersion);
// Where docs might be in relation to the executable
std::vector<std::string> prefixes = {
#if defined(_WIN32) || defined(__APPLE__)
".."
#else
"share/paraview-" PARAVIEW_VERSION
#endif
};
// Search for the docs directory
vtkNew<vtkResourceFileLocator> locator;
auto resource_dir = locator->Locate(vtk_libs, prefixes, "doc");
if (!resource_dir.empty())
{
resource_dir = vtksys::SystemTools::CollapseFullPath(resource_dir);
}
return resource_dir;
}
When building ParaView with an external VTK, we cannot infer resource_dir from the path of VTK’s libraries, since those come from a different installation. As a potential fix, could we instead infer resource_dir from ParaView’s own libraries or main executable?
Also, I would suggest making prefixes configurable via a CMake option. For example, we might want to set prefixes = "share/paraview" when PARAVIEW_VERSIONED_INSTALL is OFF.