Re: hunting dependencies

[Bruno Haible]

Simon Josefsson wrote:
> I didn't know why a
> certain module was pulled in, and it wasn't immediately clear from the
> modules I requested.  A different way to resolve this problem could be
> with a 'gnulib-tool --why strdup' command that could print:
> 
>   uniconv/u8-strconv-from-locale
>   uniconv/u8-strconv-from-enc
>   uniconv/u8-conv-from-enc
>   striconveha
>   strdup
> 
> with the first line being something I manually requested.
> 
> Just an idea, it might be too much work to implement this logic in shell
> script.  There is complexity because there may be multiple paths too,
> although I think naming only one would be sufficient.

I think, on the contrary, it would be essential to show all paths,
otherwise the user does work to cut a dependency and then afterwards notices
that there are other paths to the particular dependency that are much
harder to cut.

All this is in the area of graph display, where the graph is a Directed
Acyclic Graph and 'gnulib-tool --extract-dependencies' provides the links
between nodes. I won't have time to plunge into this; volunteers welcome.

Bruno
-- 
In memoriam Pierre Brossolette <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Brossolette>