Hi,
I have been tracking the development of ParaView over the years.
My understanding is that (C++) plugins and extension development generally require building it together with the source code of ParaView
Are there plans to build and package ParaView in such a way that it will have the usual separate includes/libraries and associated CMake config to link with them.
I believe this may lessen the development load to prototype new plugins idea and help add to the ecosystem.
Kind regards
There was a tentative solution called the ParaView SDK. It is sadly not full feature and I would not recommend its usage for now, for more info: Build redistributable ParaView (SDK) using ParaViewPluginBuilder - #3 by Senui
The solution used by everyone for now (apart from rebuilding ParaView) are two projects:
https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview-easy-plugin-builder
A project dedicated to automatize plugin compilation for the Linux binary release of ParaView
https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview-plugin-windows-binary-compatible-guide
A guide explaining how to manually build a plugin compatible with the Windows binary release of ParaView
hth,
An SDK would be great to have. We could just bundle up the install directory we make the package from and some scripts to make any plugin artifacts it makes suitable for distributing, but the install tree is “pinned” to its absolute path. The work involved is to make sure that everything there is also relocatable for development use. There are a lot of places absolute paths sneak in, but I think it should still be a post-processing step since getting every project to make relocatable bits is difficult to coordinate cross-platform (particularly @rpath on macOS).