On Wed, March 10, 2010 17:27, Akim Demaille wrote: > Now that Graphviz is free software, with nice software available on all > the common architectures, what's the point of maintaining VCG output? Some notes and drawbacks of graphviz dot:
Graphviz dot is not GNU GPL compatible, (parts of) dot source cannot be integrated re-used in GNU GPL projects. There is no really working dot graph language parser GNU GPL available for interface to GNU GPL software. There is a vcg GNU GPL graph language parser/lexer. The dot graph language is difficult to parse completely because parser info is also embedded in strings. Writing a complete working dot graph parser is difficult compared to the easy vcg graph language. The dot tool has limits on maximum output image size resulting in segfault at too large input graph, now dot seems to be fixed and scales down the image. xvcg with -ppmoutput option does indeed generate really big images without limits and runs stable doing that. It is easy to add the older vcg driver in bison source, and does not need maintance, it is bugfree and friendly to offer users a choice of output graph type, and no hidden 'vendor lock-in' to non-GPL software. Also doing a small project vcgview at googlecode http://code.google.com/p/vcgviewer/ which is a maintained gtk+ gui program to read vcg and it can read the bison dot graph output too. Currently adding output to the gnome dia GNU GPL program to make it possible to edit the graph and export to several other file types. This are some reasons to add the older vcg driver in bison and only few hours work to get that done. Greetings, Tys Lefering.
