Upgrade OSPRay to 2.8.0

[StasJ]

The latest binaries can be found here:

https://www.ospray.org/downloads.html

[shaomeng]

One thing to consider is if we take this opportunity to upgrade all 3rd party libraries. Note that the last time they were updated was August 2019.

Also consider using the official QT libraries instead of the ones built by us. Our own build triggers macOS security alerts on every new environment.

[clyne]

What tangible benefit would we get by upgrading all of our 3rd party libraries? Are they currently causing portability issues? Is there some new feature that we need? We need to consider these things because upgrading all of the 3rd party libs is a non trivial process

[shaomeng]

What tangible benefit would we get by upgrading all of our 3rd party libraries?

I don't have any specific items, but after 2.5 years it sounds about right to do a big upgrade

We need to consider these things because upgrading all of the 3rd party libs is a non trivial process

It's definitely non trivial, but my direction of thinking is to invest in more automated building scripts/processes. A benefit of that approach is that hurdles for outside developers/researchers are lowered.

A note on build automation: CMake has some helper functions to make it easier. The following code is an example (on the easier side) where 3 lines of CMake script downloads and configures and builds the package of GoogleTest and makes it available as a dependency.

include(FetchContent)
FetchContent_Declare( googletest  URL https://github.com/google/googletest/archive/refs/heads/main.zip )
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(googletest)

[clyne]

@sgpearse should chime in on the effort involved here. I don't want to hold up our release just to upgrade the libraries if there is no obvious benefit for doing so. But if the libraries can be upgraded without much effort, sounds good to me.

[shaomeng]

Sounds good. I definitely agree that it's not a must do.

[sgpearse]

Rebuilding all libraries on all platforms would be a considerable effort.

I'm trying to have all libraries updated with Ospray 2.8 today, but there have been snags along the way, some much bigger than others. I'll share more details once I've confirmed that all installers are running.

[clyne]

@sgpearse can we close this now?

[sgpearse]

Yep. Closing.