[Paraview] Convenient copy of VTK within ParaView

[Mathieu Malaterre]

Dear all,

I'm writing on behalf of Debian Science, the umbrella organization
behind the packaging of paraview for the debian system.
There is a blocking issue with ParaView current packaging [1].
Basically debian strives to deliver stable and supported software. To
that effect, we are required to remove any 'convenient' copy of
libraries as per debian policy [2].
In order to address this issue in the best possible way, we would like
to know what is the position of the paraview developers on this. We
understand that ParaView and VTK have different release cycles and as
such it is hard to synchronize those cycles.
However we would be interested to know if paraview could be build
using a system installed VTK. Would it be possible to have, say, an
advanced option to build ParaView in a 'stable' VTK mode? This would
require the build system of paraview to check for the VTK version
before building paraview module. Would such patch be applied upstream
? Would paraview developers help us with this integration ?

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=654839
[2] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#s-embeddedfiles

Thanks for your reading,
-- 
Mathieu