building paraview 5.5.2 on opensuse leap 15.0

ParaView Support
#1

After a fresh install of leap 15.0, I added all of the usual long list of Qt libraries and development headers, but was still unable to build at all.

Blocking point 1: no qhelpgenerator found.
It is actually there, but as qhelpgenerator-qt5, which cmake does not find. It seems too ugly to partly installing some qt4 bits just for that, so instead I opted for a somewhat less ugly workaround:

cd /etc/alternatives
ln -s /usr/bin/qhelpconverter-qt5  qhelpconverter
ln -s /usr/bin/qhelpgenerator-qt5  qhelpgenerator

cd /usr/bin
ln -s /etc/alternatives/qhelpconverter  qhelpconverter
ln -s /etc/alternatives/qhelpgenerator  qhelpgenerator

This isn’t 100% elegant, but works and partly documents through the filesytem what fiddling has been done.

This might be of some use for others…

/mark

#2

What happens if you set the cmake options QT_HELP_GENERATOR to the right value with the symbolic link ?

#3

Didn’t try that since I figured if it found the correct qmake-qt5 (and all the packages are installed) then really everything else should follow.

#4

Actually, cmake uses a file (Qt5-config.cmake) in your Qt5 package to find all related info.
If for some reasons this file is not the same accross all distribution, results may vary.

It is possible that OpenSUSE distribute qhelpgenerator as a separate package for example, and require a manual settings.

Using symbolic link as a neat trick to just not think about it anymore, but I would not recommend it as a valid solution as it requires root.

Of course, this should be fixed by OpenSSUS upstream.

#5

There is a qhelpgenerator, which is qt4 and a qhelpgenerator-qt5.

The /usr/lib64/cmake/Qt5Help/Qt5HelpConfigExtras.cmake lists lib64/qt5/bin/qhelpgenerator so it is an upstream distro bug!

#6

Actually not a distro bug after all.
For more details see the corresponding issue and merge request.
I’d suggest continuing the discussion there.