The source tarball was generated from the official Paraview git repository at https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview with third party modules (e.g. VTK) already included, rather than retrieving them at build time. Should this need to be replicated, checkout the 5.1.2 branch of the ParaView git repository and initialise the submodules as shown in the session output below: chris@d6:/tmp/paraview-5.1.2$ git br * 5.1.2 master chris@d6:/tmp/paraview-5.1.2$ git submodule update --init Submodule 'ThirdParty/IceT/vtkicet' (https://gitlab.kitware.com/icet/icet.git) registered for path 'ThirdParty/IceT/vtkicet' Submodule 'ThirdParty/QtTesting/vtkqttesting' (https://github.com/Kitware/QtTesting.git) registered for path 'ThirdParty/QtTesting/vtkqttesting' Submodule 'ThirdParty/protobuf/vtkprotobuf' (https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/protobuf.git) registered for path 'ThirdParty/protobuf/vtkprotobuf' Submodule 'Utilities/VisItBridge' (https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/visitbridge.git) registered for path 'Utilities/VisItBridge' Submodule 'VTK' (https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk.git) registered for path 'VTK' Cloning into '/tmp/paraview-5.1.2/ThirdParty/IceT/vtkicet'... Cloning into '/tmp/paraview-5.1.2/ThirdParty/QtTesting/vtkqttesting'... Cloning into '/tmp/paraview-5.1.2/ThirdParty/protobuf/vtkprotobuf'... Cloning into '/tmp/paraview-5.1.2/Utilities/VisItBridge'... Cloning into '/tmp/paraview-5.1.2/VTK'... Submodule path 'ThirdParty/IceT/vtkicet': checked out '0d08b037f3fa8b6e1a82ed2beb84e024c06f895f' Submodule path 'ThirdParty/QtTesting/vtkqttesting': checked out '706d5cd1bbdd0658802da63b940c8bb2d1f3d192' Submodule path 'ThirdParty/protobuf/vtkprotobuf': checked out '3637bc9efc2c29c54ee907e4341e39127599c4ec' Submodule path 'Utilities/VisItBridge': checked out 'f8dd33fcfd025fd5b878b07f4d2e7deb5573e379' Submodule path 'VTK': checked out '31b13ea55f8db68b64e9412b7896e0e8110aedfe'