Bug#536245: RFH: graphviz -- rich set of graph drawing tools

[Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: normal

Heya folks.

I request assistance with maintaining the graphviz package. That might
also move to an RFA later on.

Given I'm slowly drifting to more porting, I'm currently lacking time to
maintain graphviz properly. If you're interested, you may want to be
aware of some points:
 - Upstream is very nice, but now ships a bundled debian/ directory in
   its tarball, and will continue to do so. Repacking is/will be needed.
 - There are libraries, with different sonames, and plugins. I guess
   there's very little point in splitting the current libgraphviz4
   library in more libraries (given it only has 3 rdeps last I checked)
   but you'll need to understand the library packaging issues here, and
   try hard not to break anything.
 - There are bindings for several languages, and some bugs open against
   them. These bindings were requested presumably for Ubuntu, and given
   that some aren't really used, or buggy, it might make sense to drop
   some. Note that obviously, upstream doesn't know how to use each of
   them, given they're swig-generated.

That's all I can think of right now. Packaging is in collab-maint's git
(debian-only, but I'm not opposed to seeing this evolve in some other
setup), patches can be pushed there in some branches, or even in
“unstable” if you know what you're doing.


The package description follows:
 Graph drawing addresses the problem of visualizing structural information
 by constructing geometric representations of abstract graphs and networks.
 Automatic generation of graph drawings has important applications in key
 technologies such as database design, software engineering, VLSI and
 network design and visual interfaces in other domains. Situations where
 these tools might be particularly useful include:
 .
   * you would like to restructure a program and first need to understand
     the relationships between its types, procedures, and source files
   * you need to find the bottlenecks in an Internet backbone - not only
     individual links, but their relationships
   * you're debugging a protocol or microarchitecture represented as a
     finite state machine and need to figure out how a certain
     error state arises
   * you would like to browse a database schema, knowledge base, or
     distributed program represented graphically
   * you would like to see an overview of a collection of linked documents
   * you would like to discover patterns and communities of interest in a
     database of telephone calls or e-mail messages


Thanks in advance.

Mraw,
KiBi.