[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: graphviz-2999.0.0.0

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com
Sun Jul 19 04:13:52 EDT 2009


Two clarifications I'd like to add to my previous announcement (both of
which were prompted by Zsolt :p ):

1. Some Attribute values take something like (Either Bool String); this
   is used when upstream indicates that two different types of values
   are allowed.  Typically in this kind of situation, the allowed String
   values are limited to a few specific values, so the usage of Either
   typically indicates that they should be replaced with a custom value
   type.

2. When considering the new representation of DotGraph, this isn't
   limited to just people who wish to parse Dot code: if you want to do
   anything out of the ordinary/fancy, then unfortunately you will need
   this imperative usage (as the indicated way to have global attributes
   to a graph but not to its subgraphs is to list all the subgraphs, and
   then define the graph attribute).

   For an example of this, consider the layout of Andy Gill's dotgen
   library [1].  If you look at the internals, he does consider graphs
   to be a list of statements.  This amongst other things allows him to
   have a monadic interface for building graphs with much greater
   flexibility in what you can do, whereas graphviz limits you to either
   converting a pre-existing graph or else creating one within the
   limits of specifying it as a list of global attributes, a list of
   nodes/clusters and a list of edges between the nodes.

   [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/dotgen

   What I'm considering is that if I internally represent DotGraph as a
   list of statements, then I will have getNodes and getEdges functions
   to extract the nodes and edges (with their attributes) out.  This
   also simplifies some of the definitions, as a subgraph/cluster is
   then also just a list of statements.

Zsolt Dollenstein <zsol.zso.l at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <
> ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I am pleased to announce a new release of the graphviz package for
>> Haskell, which provides bindings to the GraphViz [1] suite of tools.
>>
>
> Nice work!
>
> As the way of defining an attribute for a specific grouping of
>>
> nodes/edges/subgraphs is to have them all listed after the attribute
>> definition (whereas those beforehand do not have this attribute), the
>> imperative nature of the Dot language does not allow us to split these
>> statements up as we currently do.
>>
>> [3] http://graphviz.org/doc/info/lang.html
>>
>> As such, I'm asking which of the following two choices people would
>> prefer:
>>  1. Follow upstream so that it can fully parse a Dot graph
>>  2. Keep it as it is, so that it is possible to consider all edges,
>>     etc. easily.
>
>
> I would vote for the second one since I think that is the most widely used
> feature of this package.
>
> Cheers,
> Zsolt

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com


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