[ANNOUNCE] headergraphs - kernel header dependency visualizer

[ANNOUNCE] headergraphs - kernel header dependency visualizer

[Ray Lehtiniemi]

Greetings,

I got interested in tracing kernel header file dependencies and wrote yet 
another Perl script to generate PostScript using graphviz.  Folks interested 
in that sort of thing are invited to check out:

   http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rayl/headergraphs/

cheers

ray

Re: [ANNOUNCE] headergraphs - kernel header dependency visualizer

[Sam Ravnborg]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 12:17:06PM -0600, Ray Lehtiniemi wrote:
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> I got interested in tracing kernel header file dependencies and wrote yet 
> another Perl script to generate PostScript using graphviz.  Folks interested 
> in that sort of thing are invited to check out:
> 
>    http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rayl/headergraphs/

Hi Ray.

Look nice. My gsview (on my windoze box) did not recognize media size
so I had to manually adjust it afterwards.
Is it possible to make the images smaller so we could fit more
information in less space?

	Sam

Re: [ANNOUNCE] headergraphs - kernel header dependency visualizer

[Ray Lehtiniemi]

On Wednesday 20 September 2006 16:02, Sam Ravnborg wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 12:17:06PM -0600, Ray Lehtiniemi wrote:
> > Greetings,
> >
> > I got interested in tracing kernel header file dependencies and wrote yet
> > another Perl script to generate PostScript using graphviz.  Folks
> > interested in that sort of thing are invited to check out:
> >
> >    http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rayl/headergraphs/
>
> Hi Ray.
>
> Look nice.

thanks :-)


> My gsview (on my windoze box) did not recognize media size 
> so I had to manually adjust it afterwards.

i have switched from postscript to png.  png files seem to render a heck of a 
lot faster than postscript does.  hopefully there's a good windows png viewer 
available...



> Is it possible to make the images smaller so we could fit more
> information in less space?

i've made a few changes to increase the graph density, but it's still a little 
on the sparse side.  please check the url above for updated readme and sample 
images.


ray

Re: [ANNOUNCE] headergraphs - kernel header dependency visualizer

[Jan Engelhardt]

>
>> My gsview (on my windoze box) did not recognize media size 
>> so I had to manually adjust it afterwards.
>
>i have switched from postscript to png.  png files seem to render a heck of a 
>lot faster than postscript does.  hopefully there's a good windows png viewer 
>available...

graphviz (/usr/bin/dot) can do SVG too.


Jan Engelhardt
-- 

Re: [ANNOUNCE] headergraphs - kernel header dependency visualizer

[Sam Ravnborg]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2006 at 08:11:13AM +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> >
> >> My gsview (on my windoze box) did not recognize media size 
> >> so I had to manually adjust it afterwards.
> >
> >i have switched from postscript to png.  png files seem to render a heck of a 
> >lot faster than postscript does.  hopefully there's a good windows png viewer 
> >available...
> 
> graphviz (/usr/bin/dot) can do SVG too.

Reminds me...
Arnaldo (acme) made a few simple scripts that was based on dot.
They are at his home directory at kernel.org.

Care to take at look at these to see if there is something to be learned.
One good feature was that each level had a different color,
and I recall the graphs was more dense with less (confusing?) info.

	Sam

Re: [ANNOUNCE] headergraphs - kernel header dependency visualizer

[Ray Lehtiniemi]

On Thursday 21 September 2006 00:11, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> >> My gsview (on my windoze box) did not recognize media size
> >> so I had to manually adjust it afterwards.
> >
> >i have switched from postscript to png.  png files seem to render a heck
> > of a lot faster than postscript does.  hopefully there's a good windows
> > png viewer available...
>
> graphviz (/usr/bin/dot) can do SVG too.

yes, i tried viewing those with inkscape, but the strings were rendered too 
large... didn't bother to dig into whose fault it was, since png worked 
nicely when i tried it.

if this ends up being a generally useful tool, it'll be trivial to select the 
output format as a runtime option anyway.

ray

Re: [ANNOUNCE] headergraphs - kernel header dependency visualizer

[Ray Lehtiniemi]

On Thursday 21 September 2006 00:40, Sam Ravnborg wrote:

> Reminds me...
> Arnaldo (acme) made a few simple scripts that was based on dot.
> They are at his home directory at kernel.org.

yah, the very first commit in my tree is an import of those scripts for 
reference purposes :-)


> Care to take at look at these to see if there is something to be learned.
> One good feature was that each level had a different color,
> and I recall the graphs was more dense with less (confusing?) info.

those graphs contain _much_ less information.

the primary complexity reduction mechanism in hviz appears to be that it adds 
the current file to the done list immediately before it starts the 
breadth-first search of the children.  this eliminates the possibility of 
back edges to previously seen headers, which is why those graphs flow so 
nicely from left to right.  unfortunately, it also discards most of the 
dependency information.

my goal was to retain and present information from _all_ edges in the graph, 
not just those which lead to new children.  even for relatively small 
hierarchies, these graphs generally wind up looking like a big ball of yarn, 
which is where all the confusing colors and numbers come into play.  they are 
the distilled remnants of all the edges that have been pruned.  only a select 
few edges remain to tie the whole thing together.


ray