Re: New ‘guix graph’ command

[Leo Famulari]

Very nice! This will be much easier than my ersatz solution of making filesystem trees by hand and then running `tree` on them.

 

Another tool for the visual thinkers...

 

 

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015, at 18:53, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

Hi!

 

Here’s a long overdue ‘guix graph’ command (documentation below.)

Comments welcome!

 

Ludo’.

 

 

5.9 Invoking ‘guix graph’

=========================

 

Packages and their dependencies form a “graph”, specifically a directed

acyclic graph (DAG). It can quickly become difficult to have a mental

model of the package DAG, so the ‘guix graph’ command is here to provide

a visual representation of the DAG. ‘guix graph’ emits a DAG

representation in the input format of Graphviz

(http://www.graphviz.org/), so its output can be passed directly to

Graphviz’s ‘dot’ command, for instance.  The general syntax is:

 

    guix graph OPTIONS PACKAGE…

 

  For example, the following command generates a PDF file representing

the package DAG for the GNU Core Utilities, showing its build-time

dependencies:

 

    guix graph coreutils | dot -Tpdf > dag.pdf

 

  The output looks like this:

 

 

  Nice little graph, no?

 

  But there’s more than one graph!  The one above is concise: it’s the

graph of package objects, omitting implicit inputs such as GCC, libc,

grep, etc.  It’s often useful to have such a concise graph, but

sometimes you want to see more details.  ‘guix graph’ supports several

types of graphs, allowing you to choose the level of details:

 

‘package’

    This is the default type, the one we used above.  It shows the DAG

    of package objects, excluding implicit dependencies.  It is

    concise, but filters out many details.

 

‘bag-emerged’

    This is the package DAG, _including_ implicit inputs.

 

    For instance, the following command:

 

          guix graph --type=bag-emerged coreutils | dot -Tpdf > dag.pdf

 

    ...  yields this bigger graph:

 

 

    At the bottom of the graph, we see all the implicit inputs of

    GNU-BUILD-SYSTEM (*note ‘gnu-build-system’: Build Systems.).

 

    Now, note that the dependencies of those implicit inputs—that is,

    the “bootstrap dependencies” (*note Bootstrapping::)—are not shown

    here, for conciseness.

 

‘bag’

    Similar to ‘bag-emerged’, but this time including all the bootstrap

    dependencies.

 

‘derivations’

    This is the most detailed representation: It shows the DAG of

    derivations (*note Derivations::) and plain store items.  Compared

    to the above representation, many additional nodes are visible,

    including builds scripts, patches, Guile modules, etc.

 

  All the above types correspond to _build-time dependencies_.  The

following graph type represents the _run-time dependencies_:

 

‘references’

    This is the graph of “references” of a package output, as returned

    by ‘guix gc --references’ (*note Invoking guix gc::).

 

    If the given package output is not available in the store, ‘guix

    graph’ attempts to obtain dependency information from substitutes.

 

  The available options are the following:

 

‘--type=TYPE’

‘-t TYPE’

    Produce a graph output of TYPE, where TYPE must be one of the

    values listed above.

 

‘--list-types’

    List the supported graph types.

 

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