11 Jul 2008 acj   » (Observer)

Yesterday, 10 July, was the due date for the second milestone of my work on DebGraph. I am happy to report that we are roughly two weeks ahead of schedule, so meeting this milestone was not a cause for worry.

We now have support for the following graph operators:

  • Difference
  • Intersection
  • Filter (by properties)
  • Find Cycles (via Tarjan's algorithm)
  • Find Dependencies
  • Find Reverse Dependencies
  • Symmetric Difference (XOR)
  • Union

The next milestone includes the development of a high-level language (or integration with an existing extension language) that streamlines the construction of complex queries using the operators listed above. We can build arbitrarily complex queries using the C++ operators, but dealing with the static typing and compiler toolchain can be very clunky. As such, I have spent the past week working on Lua bindings for DebGraph, which will enable us to query the graph of Debian packages from a clean, dynamically typed language. Lua has a powerful C API that exposes the Lua stack and lets us move DebGraph information to and from the Lua interpreter. I'm writing documentation that outlines how to use DebGraph from both C++ and Lua in order to make this work accessible to more folks.

Sneak peak
As an example, we can utilize the FindCycles operator in Lua as follows:


libdg = package.loadlib("./libdebgraph.so",
"luaopen_libdebgraph")
libdg()
LoadPackages('cache')
-- 'g' is the main graph of unstable binary-arm packages
cycles = FindCycles(g)
print("Found " .. #fc .. " cycles")
for comp_key,comp in pairs(cycles) do
    comp_nodes = ""
    for node_key,node in pairs(comp) do
        prop = GetProperty(node, "Package")
        comp_nodes = comp_nodes .. prop .. " "
    end
    print("* " .. comp_nodes)
end

The above Lua script produces the following result:


reading cache/unstable/main/binary-arm/Packages
Found 61 cycles
* debconf-english debconf-i18n debconf
* perl-modules perl 
* cdebconf fontconfig-config fontconfig gsfonts-x11
libcairo2 libfontconfig1 libgtk2.0-0 libpango1.0-0
libpango1.0-common libxft2 ucf x11-utils xutils
[...]

These are the package names in the strongly connected components, shown in alphabetical order.

There is still a lot of work to do before the Lua binding will achieve feature parity with the core library, but we have now laid the foundation (and a brick or two).

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