Superbuild question: using local Paraview sources for custom application?

A custom application is built on a Paraview application, and now I have applied two very little changes in my local copy of the paraview sources (one bug fix that I reported, and one case of turning off warning messages that are only confusing for users). I can now locally compile Paraview, and I can also locally compile my custom application to include the locally compiled Paraview dlls.

However I do not succeed with the same during a superbuild because - so far, and with the standard setup! - it always downloads a “fresh” version of the paraview sources - without my patches.

So first of all I have chosen for the “paraview_SOURCE_SELECTION” the “source” value, and then I entered the paraview_DIR with where my local paraview source code resides. This looked like the “obvious” way to do the thing.

But then I was stuck: During the superbuild I always run into a message that tells me that the CMake cache cannot be loaded - from <build_target>/superbuild/paraview/build. Where in the default case the downloaded code will be built, but now I find this folder empty!

Yes indeed, from an empty folder the CMake cache cannot be loaded.

But I would expect now that either the superbuild would fill that folder somehow automatically (like with the downloaded paraview sources), or simply use my locally built version.

So there are two possible answers:

  • something I should have done in addition to adding the paraview_DIR
  • a bug in the superbuild (because nobody ever does such a thing normally anyway…)

For the moment I gave up and switched back to the downloaded version, without the patches, because tomorrow I am going to deliver the program to a customer. But for the future I would indeed like to get this problem solved - because the patches are still important!

Hi Cornelis,

What you are doing is correct and should work. The two cmake var to set are:

paraview_SOURCE_SELECTION
paraview_SOURCE_DIR

And it is being tested with success nightly.

You probably still have a build tree for the “downloaded” case there. It needs to be deleted first. CMake is detecting the use of a build tree with two different source trees and erroring out.

Thanks for the confirmation (from two sides)!

Actually this is what I had first (complaint about “diferent source dirs”), then I deleted the entire tree and restarted - and now the complaint was about “cannot load cache” (…from the empty directory…).

However, I was also getting nervous because because I needed some “product” whatsoever immediately - so I switched back for the moment to “downloaded”.

However, with your workd (and Mathieus’s) I will try again next week - maybe with less stress and better luck! Problem is that it takes time to test and try - but this is no news.

Regards, Cornelis