Re: bison-2.4.1 with more graph output

[Akim Demaille]

Le 10 mars 2010 à 21:25, tys lefering a écrit :

Hi Tys,

> 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.
[...]

Thanks for all the details!  Yet, I don't understand why we wouldn't complete 
the VCG tools with a GPL dot-parser.  Maybe it won't support all the features 
of the full dot language, but dot is so well established that, even though I 
concur on the weaknesses of its syntax for complex labels, fighting it seems 
like quite a difficult challenge.

> 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.

Yes, but I'm no big fan of having several outputs here.  Joel might have 
another opinion.  Maybe gnulib could support a factored means to support both 
outputs.  But the xsl-based approach you recently proposed seems a more 
acceptable path.  Would that be good enough for you?