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