building plugins/modules with paraview-5.7.0 cmake

[ben.boeckel (Ben Boeckel (Kitware))]

@olesenm

Specifically, the following bit fails since it cannot find the include/libs:

try_compile

This is the wrong way to check for libraries now. You can just do if (TARGET VTK::ParallelMPI) in this case. Note that ParaView finds all of VTK, so you’re OK for now, but in general, a find_package(VTK OPTIONAL_COMPONENTS ParallelMPI) would be needed to actually make it usable.

@olesenm

find_package(ParaView REQUIRED COMPONENTS vtkPVPythonCatalyst)

The right spelling is PythonCatalyst. If that succeeds, the target exists and will be usable (spelled ParaView::PythonCatalyst).

@olesenm

The name of the plugin is used directly withour a lib prefix, which seem to prevent regular library loading.

Plugins are not meant to be linked to directly, so the lib doesn’t matter.

@olesenm

The name of the plugin is created as an extra directory, which means that we then have installation into lib/paraview-5.7/myPlugin/myPlugin.so instead of simply lib/paraview-5.7/libmyPlugin.so .

This is done so that any plugin-local modules live right next to the plugin and can easily be moved around as a single unit.

@olesenm

The intermediate library (for a client/server plugin) is either installed as a static, or a dynamic library - cannot seem to fully suppress its generation.

It will always be made; I can look at making its installation suppressed however.

I’ll be working on docs for plugins in 5.7 (and 5.8) via https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/19470 if you want to keep an eye on it.