Director VTK Migration Guide

[patmarion]

VTK

Starting today, director/master targets vtk6+. Previously the required version was vtk5.

The recommended version is vtk 7.1.1. VTK 8 will be released soon and may become the recommended version after some testing. Director's travis-ci tests vtk7.1.1.

I have created a branch called master-vtk5 which can be used by projects like spartan and openhumanoids until they are able to upgrade. My plan is to merge most new feature and bug fix branches into both master and master-vtk5. If you have something that needs to go into master-vtk5 only please feel free to open a PR directly to that branch.

I don't plan to maintain the master-vtk5 branch for the long term. I'm confident the spartan upgrade will be straightforward, and hopeful the openhumanoids upgrade won't be too difficult.

If you have any questions or issues please post them here.

Python3

This week I plan to upgrade director/master from python2 to python3. The master-vtk5 branch can be used for projects requiring python2. Projects that want to use new vtk and still use python2 can use a snapshot of director/master from this week, but I do not plan to make an officially named branch for that configuration.

Qt5

With this upgrade there is also new support for Qt5. But vtk6 and vtk7 don't work well with Qt5 on certain platforms. Hopefully with the upcoming vtk8 release these issues will be resolved.

cc @mauricefallon @wxmerkt @manuelli @sammy-tri