[Monotone-devel] Re: Drawing graphs

[Bruce Stephens]

Joel Crisp <address@hidden> writes:

> From the perspective of someone who has re-implemented the DOT algo
> from that paper, it is not as easy as it looks. Graphviz uses a
> number of tweaks, heuristics and some clever control features in the
> DOT format, and to get graphs which look as good as it produces you
> would have to implement a lot of code.

Just thinking about it, I'm coming to the same conclusion.  Doubtless
I'll find more complexities as I start coding.

> Generally, graph layout is a field which combines science, art and
> heuristics to get the best results; attempting to duplicate the
> features of some of the tools has cost me a lot of time.

I take it your code is proprietary (and therefore not available)?

> Trying to do the same with some simple iteration is not likely to
> work either, unless you have a very specialised graph (like the
> compiler output VCG excels at).

Well, if I concentrate on the ancestry graphs likely to be produced by
monotone (and other configuration management systems, I imagine), then
they are somewhat specialised.  For example, they ought to be acyclic
by construction.  Probably different in character to those that vcg
was designed for, but quite possibly amenable to special treatment.
Additionally, I'm not interested in beauty to quite the same extent as
dot is---I'm interested in graphs that'll be useful in an interactive
application, so space is a little less critical than for a batch
oriented program designed for print output.