Hi Kyle, thanks for your interest on DEB-VTK-packaging! It is always pleasure to have a responsive upstream. I was involved into the packaging on VTK 6 and partly VTK 5.
> 1. In general, what were the biggest challenges you faced in packaging VTK? The most difficult challenge was to use system installed versions of third-party libraries. It is gerring better now but ideally the whole VTK should have an opportunity to be built without embedded copies of those libs. > 2. In particular, what was on your "wish list" of changes that you would > have liked to see in upstream VTK that would have made packaging easier?I > see a lot of patches in the VTK 6 packaging. Well maybe you could integrate some of patches into the upstream if you find them useful? Also if you join our debian science team and help to maintain this large and important package in the collaboration with other maintainers - it would be ideally. We have also a ParaView which has unfortunately the embedded copy of VTK (8 right now). And system installed VTK is still not used by ParaView and it causes some difficulties and even violation of our rules (avoid embedded copies). > 3. There are existing Debian packages for VTK 5 and 6. Was any attempt made > to package 7 or 8, even if it was never finished? Nico and Gert are in CC. They have done a great job of packaging of VTK 7 which is now under the review of FTP-masters. My field of interests/occupation is changed so I do the minor support of VTK 6, waiting till it will be replaced by a newer version. > 4. VTK 5 and 6 are marked as "conflicting" with each other. Why is this? The > libraries and headers are name-mangled to allow multiple versions of VTK to > coexist. Is there another conflict that we didn't catch? If so, I would like > to fix it. To be honestly - I do not remember. One can probably read about it in the d/changelog, there were some technical difficulties. But generally we try not to keep many versions of the same library in the archive, keeping two of them only during the transition period. Usually the deprecated library is being removed after all dependency are switched into the new version. > Thank you in advance for your help. I look forward to bringing VTK 9 to the > Debian and Ubuntu science communities. Thank you again for the interest and we hope that the active upstream support will help us to keep VTK in a better shape and to have a newer versions sooner. Best regards Anton
