Package: rvtk 0.2.0

rvtk: Bindings for the Visualization Toolkit ('VTK')

Provides pre-compiled static 'VTK' libraries and headers so that downstream R packages can link against the Visualization Toolkit without requiring users to install 'VTK' manually. On all platforms the package first honours a user-supplied 'VTK_DIR' environment variable. On macOS it then tries 'Homebrew', followed by 'pkg-config'. On Linux it tries 'pkg-config' and well-known system prefixes ('/usr', '/usr/local'). If no suitable system installation is found on macOS or Linux, pre-built static libraries are downloaded automatically from the package's GitHub releases for x86_64 and aarch64. On Windows the package tries 'VTK_DIR', then 'Rtools45' 'pacman', then common 'MSYS2' prefixes, accepting both static ('.a') and shared ('.dll.a' import libs + DLLs) installations. When shared libraries are used, the VTK DLLs are staged in 'inst/vtk-dlls/' and an '.onLoad' hook prepends that directory to PATH via 'Sys.setenv()' when the package is loaded, and restored in '.onUnload()'. The pre-built fallback downloads static libraries by default; set 'VTK_LINK_TYPE=shared' before installation to download the DLL build instead. The pre-built bundles include the following VTK modules (plus their transitive dependencies): 'VTK_IOLegacy', 'VTK_IOXML', 'VTK_IOCore', 'VTK_CommonCore', and 'VTK_CommonDataModel'. Note that on Windows 'VTK_IONetCDF', 'VTK_IOHDF', 'VTK_GeovisCore', and 'VTK_RenderingCore' are additionally disabled because 'netcdf' and 'libproj' are not available in the 'Rtools45' 'static.posix' sysroot. Downstream packages can declare 'Imports: rvtk' and obtain the correct compiler and linker flags at install time via rvtk::CppFlags() and rvtk::LdFlagsFile(), optionally restricting linking to a subset of modules via the 'modules' argument. A convenience helper use_rvtk() (in the spirit of the 'usethis' package) automates the full setup of a downstream package: it adds 'rvtk' to 'Imports' in 'DESCRIPTION' and writes all files required to resolve VTK flags at install time ('src/Makevars', 'src/Makevars.win', 'tools/configure.R', and 'R/rvtk_imports.R'), and keeps generated build artefacts out of version control.

Authors:Aymeric Stamm [aut, cre]