Longstanding changes to OpenFOAM infrastructure for improving the handling of VTK output and paraview interfaces.
Follows up on work started with 1612 (the vtk output formatters). At that stage, we had introduced foam-vtk-cells in the attempt to consolidate vtkTopo (from foamToVTK), some bits and pieces from a foamToVTU utility and of course the paraview reader module. Each of these did something somewhat similar: namely convert OpenFOAM volume meshes into VTK formats, plus some additional management of polyhedral decomposition (since VTK still isn't the best with these). However, each of the applications have very slightly different requirements on the output format (legacy vs xml etc). Reducing the memory overhead and improving the overall performance of the paraview reader module was an additional driving factor. The latter becoming quite important if we wish to target a catalyst interface.
The key points of the updated infrastructure: