Re: problems with graphviz port and selfupdate

I'm probably veering a little off-topic for the MacPorts list now;  
I'm copying the graphviz-devel list and we should continue any solely  
Graphviz-related topics there.

On Aug 29, 2006, at 17:47, Chris wrote:

> On Aug 29, 2006, at 7:35 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> Hi Lisa. I'll make some comments below, but since you say you'd  
>> like to avoid compiling anyway, please consider using my  
>> precompiled Mac OS X builds of Graphviz 2.9 here:
>>
>> http://www.ryandesign.com/graphviz/
>>
>> I believe Graphviz should not be requiring urw-fonts, but should  
>> rather work with the user's Mac OS X fonts. I do not know whether  
>> the MacPorts version of Graphviz works like this, but mine above  
>> does.
>
> It would be wonderful to have your changes available to MacPorts as  
> a graphviz +quartz variant. The ability to use Quartz in place of  
> the built-in renderers would be tremendously useful. You refer to  
> several patches on the graphviz mailing lists, so are your changes  
> not yet integrated with the main graphviz source yet? If they apply  
> to the main source distribution, it should be easy to apply your  
> patches for a variant.
>
> The ability to build a Quartz-enabled graphviz package via MacPorts  
> would be great. In a perfect world, that would also include an  
> updated version of the graphviz.app Cocoa GUI. :)

Ah, no -- you're confusing me with Glen Low of Pixelglow who made the  
Quartz improvements to Graphviz and also the GUI wrapper. I, on the  
other hand, have done no programming of my own, and am merely  
compiling and packaging the command-line Graphviz tools and the  
various prerequisite libraries for easy installation on Mac OS X for  
those who don't want the overhead of MacPorts or Fink.

The Quartz improvements Glen made are now over two years old and have  
probably suffered some code rot. Glen has said he was considering  
pulling the Quartz bits out into a new Graphviz rendering plugin but  
I do not believe he got around to it. He's been busy with other  
things. The discussion about this can be found at the very beginning  
of the graphviz-devel list's archives. (The graphviz-devel list was  
created in response to various Mac compilation questions that came up  
on graphviz-interest where they didn't really belong.)

https://mailman.research.att.com/pipermail/graphviz-devel/ 
2005/000119.html

Since Graphviz now uses the cairo renderer, I feel that effort should  
instead be spent in getting cairo to properly support Quartz and  
ATSUI, since this would benefit not only Graphviz but every other  
project that uses cairo. Some work has been done on that in cairo 1.2  
but I have not had time to test whether it's usable now. Previously,  
I don't think it would even compile.

I provide a script you can use to patch Glen's Graphviz.app to use  
the newer Graphviz binaries installed by my installer:

sh /usr/local/graphviz-2.9/bin/fix-graphviz-app "/Applications/ 
Graphviz.app"

However this is not currently useful, as it incurs a severe  
performance penalty, and also because Graphviz with cairo currently  
generates PDFs which Mac OS X's PDF libraries cannot properly display  
(but Adobe Reader can). We do not yet know whether the bug is in  
cairo, Mac OS X or Graphviz.

Finally getting back to MacPorts, I'm sure that once Graphviz 2.10 is  
released, it should become very easy to build it and all its  
prerequisites with a simple port install command.