Superbuild extension builds failed when Python was installed - good solution?

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Hi all,

I could not build first SlicerRT then SlicerOpenIGTLink today, and it seemed that the reason was a custom Python being installed on my Windows machine. See Plastimatch build fails · Issue #198 · SlicerRt/SlicerRT · GitHub

After chatting with @lassoan we decided that we define the missing (and then after uninstalling the custom Python undefined) Python variables, see COMP: Fix Plastimatch configuration if Python was installed · SlicerRt/SlicerRT@8b67847 · GitHub and COMP: Fix subproject configuration if Python was installed by cpinter · Pull Request #116 · openigtlink/SlicerOpenIGTLink · GitHub .

My question is, mainly to @jcfr if there is a better solution for this, other than manually adding these variables to the subproject CMake files that fail to configure in this case. Thanks!

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Currently, passing the variables is a sensible approach.

To streamline this, few possible approaches:

  • (1) Update upstream VTK so that these variables are configured into vtk-config (or alike) and ensure project build against a VTK build tree would find the expected python. Now tracked in https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-/issues/18328
  • (2) In case (1) doesn’t work out, update the Slicer/VTK fork to include relevant changes. Though … would prefer to minimize Slicer specific changes in our fork and try to only include backported changes.
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One of the challenge is that there are two ways to find python libraries:

This is why we need to pass both set of variables ( PYTHON_* and Python3_*) and it may be challenging to have both sets configured into the VTK build tree …

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