plugin directories
I would like to publish a meshio-plugin for ParaView and have it recognized immediately by ParaView without having to force the user to go through Tools / Manage Plugins / Load New. Also, meshio is distributed via Debian and the question is where to install the plugin file.
From https://github.com/nschloe/meshio/issues/730:
But maybe the more important question is, where exactly is paraview expecting 3rd party plugins to be located? Do they have a standard path? The paraview plugin manager says it's expecting them in
/usr/bin/plugins
, which seems somewhat inappropriate to me. They should be reading 3rd pary plugins from/usr/bin/paraview-plugins
, or better still/usr/lib/<arch>/paraview/plugins
and/usr/share/paraview/plugins
. Paraview's built-in plugins are in/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/paraview-5.7/plugins
). Can be specified in env variablePV_PLUGIN_PATH
, but that's for users to set.
and further:
The published paraview docs (https://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Plugin_HowTo#Using_Plugins) mention "A plugins subdirectory beneath the directory containing the paraview client or server executables", while unpublished docs (https://kitware.github.io/paraview-docs/latest/cxx/PluginHowto.html) refer to "A plugins subdirectory under the paraview-X.Y directory in the library path" (i.e. /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/paraview-5.7/plugins/)
To me, /usr/share/paraview/plugins
/~/.local/share/paraview/plugins
and /usr/lib/<arch>/paraview/plugins
/~/.local/lib/<arch>/paraview/plugins
seem appropriate locations for plugins, not paths under /usr/bin
.
Opinions?