Provided by: makepp_2.0.98.5-2.1_all 
NAME
makeppgraph -- Graphical analysis of the dependency graph
DESCRIPTION
?: -?, A: -A,
--args-file,
--arguments-file, B: -b,
--because,
--build-reasons, C: &cwd, D: -D,
-d,
--dependencies,
&dir,
--dot,
--down,
--downwards, G: -g,
--graphviz, H: -h,
--help,
&home,
--html, I: -I,
-i,
--include,
--include-dir,
--includes, L: -l,
--log,
--log-file, M: -M,
-m,
&makepp,
$MAKEPPGRAPHFLAGS,
--merge,
--module, O: -o,
--output, P: -p,
--plain, R: -r,
--rename, S: -s,
--separate-directions,
&suf, T: -t,
--text, U: -u,
--up,
--upwards,
&usr, V: -V,
--version
makeppgraph [ option ... ] [ pattern ... ]
mppg [ option ... ] [ pattern ... ]
They say "A picture is worth a thousand words". So let's draw your dependency or include graph from
various viewpoints. Check out the gallery <http://makepp.sourceforge.net/gallery/> to get some ideas of
what you can do.
Each node represents a source file or a target, colored according to file name patterns. A file's node
is rectangular. A phony target's node is oval. Each solid edge represents a direct dependency.
Alternately or additionally you can display include relationships as dotted lines. For a more detailed
but not so pretty textual view see makepplog.
But beware, even for a small build the complexity can be staggering! This is because with .o files and
system includes you easily have twice as many nodes as source files. But that is nothing -- the number
of edges often far exceeds that of nodes, due to multiple include statements. A crossing-free layout is
usually impossible.
In real projects the complexity becomes insane. Techniques like template based source file generation,
preprocessors (e.g. embedded SQL, interface definition languages, Qt library) or publishing of files to
central directories (e.g. to have only one "-I" or "-L" option) make the graph explode. Even if edges
are just one pixel wide, you end up with broad black stripes of criss-crossing edges.
Once you realize what really goes on, if you're lucky, you may be able to find a way of simplifying your
build setup. But before you get there, you must drastically reduce the amount of information you
display. To that end there are various selection, renaming and merging possibilities in "makeppgraph".
When you fail to strike a balance between reducing the graph so far that it becomes sensibly displayable,
while still showing what you want to see, you may fall back to a textual graph.
OUTPUT FORMATS
Graph layouting, display and manipulation are complex tasks, which are beyond the scope of "makeppgraph".
Instead it produces input files for specialized tools. It creates an output file replacing or adding the
appropriate suffix to its first input file. If that is .makepp/log, the default, the output file will
skip the .makepp directory, leading to log.udg. If the first input is - (stdin), the output goes to
stdout.
uDraw(Graph)
With uDraw(Graph) <http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/uDrawGraph/> you get a fairly modern GUI, which
allows to select parents or children, find the other end of an edge, or hide subgraphs. Tweaking the
options like the node distances, and using splines for edges can make the graph prettier.
While the above features make this a tremendously useful tool, there are a few small hitches:
• It is quite memory hungry, such that, after a longish meditation, it may crash without having
displayed anything -- a clear sign that you must reduce the number of nodes and/or edges further.
• It strongly separates graph attributes and display options. This means that you can't put into a
generated graph the fact that it is to be oriented sideways (which is generally necessary here
because, even when renamed to something short, filenames are much wider than tall). As a workaround,
if you don't want to make it your default, or choose orientation from the menu every time, they
propose a little starter script:
export UDG_HOME=/where/ever/uDrawGraph-3.1
TMP=`mktemp -t udg.XXXXXX` || exit 1
trap "rm -f $TMP" EXIT
echo "[menu(file(open_graph(\"${1-log.udg}\"))),menu(layout(orientation(left_right)))]" >$TMP
$UDG_HOME/bin/uDrawGraph -init $TMP
• It doesn't yet support node border colors. Due to this "--because" displays double borders when they
should be red.
• When merging several files into one node leads to self edges both with "--dependencies" and
"--includes", only one of these will be displayed, randomly dotted or drawn through and with a label
of "2*".
Graphviz
Graphviz <http://www.graphviz.org/> consists of several command line tools, which allow many more export
formats than uDraw(Graph). That includes not only static image formats but also input for designer
programs like dia. There is a utility "twopi" for creating a radial layout, which is nice if your graph
comes close to a true tree, i.e. your dependencies fan out, but few nodes have common dependencies with
others. There are a few viewers available, none of which helps you to navigate along the structure of
the graph:
dotty
Its own display tool, dotty, has the advantage over uDraw(Graph) that you can freely drag the nodes,
without being restricted to the level assigned by the layout. When your screen is full of edges,
dragging one node gives you a nice impression of where the edges of that node lead to. But it also
loses information when you modify it. Apart from that it is an antiquated Xlib tool. It also
displays an annoying little circle on the middle of each edge, and no option seems to get rid of it.
ZGRViewer
ZGRViewer <http://zvtm.sourceforge.net/zgrviewer.html> is a separately downloadable Java viewer which
has comfortable zooming and panning. The graph is only viewable, no moving of nodes. There are five
buttons in the view area, which offer additional fancy semi-3D zoom variations, but, unlike the basic
functionality, they can be extremely slow depending on your Java setup. For my Sun Linux Java, the
following gave a tremendous boost:
export J2D_PIXMAPS=shared USE_DGA_PIXMAPS=1
Grappa
Grappa is a separately downloadable Java 1.2 viewer. There is no wrapper shell script, the jar
contains no manifest, none of the sources contain a main function, and with the appletviewer it
produced two tall windows which hang with a "starting applet" message, so I don't know how to test
this. It can be tried on a demo web site as an applet.
Selecting an edge makes it bold red, so you can manually scroll its other end into view without
loosing it out of sight. Other than that and zooming and deleting nodes it seems to have no useful
features. It ignores valid hexadecimal color specifications.
SVG SVG, one of the file types the backends can export to, is already quite old. But some browsers still
have problems with it. When embedding it with an object tag only Opera scales it, others clip it,
which is useless for a thumbnail. When viewed as a document of it's own, only Opera and Konqueror
allow scaling it, while Firefox scales only the labels. Even though the labels are text, no browser
can search for them. IE6 doesn't have a clue, unless you install a plugin. A dedicated application,
like Inkscape, can serve you better.
HTML
This is a simple unordered list tree format that can be perused with any browser. You should have
JavaScript and CSS, which allows folding subtrees and seeing colors. Usually your graph will not be a
tree, which is worked around by repeating nodes in every subtree needed, but as a link to the first
occurrence where you can see all its attributes. Due to IE's limited Unicode support, vertical arrows
are used for include relations, instead of the usual dotted arrows.
Textual Graph
This is a simple indentation-based format that can be perused with any text viewer. This means you can
usually study much bigger graphs than with the other formats. In Emacs you can use outline and foldout
for very powerful graph navigation with this little wrapper mode:
(define-derived-mode textgraph-mode outline-mode "Graph"
(view-mode)
(set (make-local-variable 'outline-regexp) " *.")
(set (make-local-variable 'outline-level)
(lambda () (/ (- (match-end 0) (match-beginning 0) -1) 2)))
(set (make-local-variable 'outline-font-lock-keywords)
'(("^ *\\(?:{[a-z,]+} \\)?\\([^{\n]+\\)" (1 (outline-font-lock-face) nil t))))
(setq imenu-generic-expression
'((nil "^ *\\(?:{[a-z,]+} \\)?\\(.+?\\)\\(?:{[a-z,]+}\\)?$" 1))))
The lines can have comma separated annotations between braces, unless you also give the "-p, --plain"
option. When these come before the target they pertain to the relationship with the parent, i.e. the
previous line indented less. When they come after the target, they pertain to the target itself. They
are as follows:
because
When this comes before a target, the parent was built because of this one. When it comes after, the
target had some inherent reason for being rebuilt.
bidirectional
This dependency or inclusion goes in both directions.
include
The parent includes this file. This annotation is only given when also showing dependencies.
phony
This is a phony target.
repeated
The information about this target and its children was already given earlier on.
OPTIONS
If you give no patterns, makeppgraph will start operating with all the nodes it can extract from makepp's
log. When given one or more patterns (using "?", "*", "**" and/or "[...]"), it will match those in the
file system and operate on any that also occur in the log. For these it will by default select
"upwards", i.e. all targets that depend on and/or include any of them and "downwards", i.e. all targets
and/or sources, which any of them depends on and/or includes. (The directions are metaphorical, because
the graph is best displayed from left "top" to right "bottom" due to the width of the nodes.)
-A filename
--args-file=filename
--arguments-file=filename
Read the file and parse it as possibly quoted whitespace- and/or newline-separated options.
-b
--because
--build-reasons
If a node was rebuilt because of a dependency, then that edge is shown in red. Alas makepp applies
optimizations to detect when a target needs rebuilding, such that it often can't say which file
triggered the rebuild. If the node was rebuilt for a reason not attributed to another file, then the
node's border is red. With uDraw(Graph) a double border is used instead, as it doesn't support
border color.
-D
--dependencies
Draw a graph of the dependency relationship determined by makepp. This is the default unless "-i,
--includes" is also given.
-d
--down
--downwards
This option is only meaningful if you provide one or more patterns. It will then only select the
targets and/or sources which the matched files depend on, or which they include.
-g
--graphviz
--dot
Produce a Graphviz .dot file, instead of the default uDraw(Graph) .udg file.
-h
--html
Produce a browser .html file, instead of the default uDraw(Graph) .udg file.
-?
--help
Print out a brief summary of the options.
-I directory
--include=directory
--include-dir=directory
Add directory to Perl load path @INC.
-i
--includes
Instead of dependencies (or with "-D, --dependencies" additionally to them) draw a graph of include
relationships. This will only have been logged as far as it needed to be analyzed. To get the full
picture you need a fresh full build.
-l filename
--log=filename
--log-file=filename
The filename is to where makepp wrote its log. It may also be a directory, in which a file called
.makepp/log or log will be searched. To read from stdin, you must give - as a filename. When this
option is not given, it defaults to the current directory.
This option can be given multiple times, e.g. for merging all the logs from
"--traditional-recursive-make". But the dependencies you hid from makepp through the evil recursion
paradigm can't of course show up here.
-M module[=arg,...]
--module=module[=arg,...]
Load module and import any functions it exports.
-m perlcode
--merge=perlcode
Perform perlcode for every target and its dependencies. See merging for details about this option.
-o filename
--output=filename
Write the output to this file.
-p
--plain
Don't use attributes like colors or dotted lines. This is especially useful for uncluttering "-t,
--text" output. In that format bidirectional edges will be lost unless you combine this with "-s,
--separate-directions".
-r perlcode
--rename=perlcode
Perform perlcode for every target and its dependencies. See renaming for details about this option.
-s
--separate-directions
Draw two separate arrows, instead of each double ended arrow, to make them easier to spot.
-t
--text
Produce a human readable .txt file, instead of the default uDraw(Graph) .udg file.
-u
--up
--upwards
This option is only meaningful if you provide one or more patterns. It will then only select the
targets which depend on and/or include the matched files.
-V
--version
Print out the version number.
REWRITING
The techniques in this chapter are usually essential to get a reasonably sized graph. As they are
formulated as Perl code, knowing the language is helpful. But you should be able to achieve quite a lot
with the examples here or in the gallery <http://makepp.sourceforge.net/gallery/>.
Renaming
This is the first name rewriting that occurs, if the "-r, --rename" option is given. For every name
encountered, perlcode gets called. It gets a filename in $_, and it may modify it. This is often
needed, because makepp logs fully qualified file names, so one node can easily be half a screen wide.
For one thing, you can rewrite names to "undef" or the empty string. This will eliminate the node from
the graph. Note that eliminating a node in this first stage will break a chain of dependency if this
node was in the middle.
You can also rewrite various names to the same string, coercing them all into the same node, which
accumulates the combined dependencies and dependents.
On the other hand you can just rename names to (usually) shorter names, so as to reduce the width of
nodes, which can be far to wide with absolute filenames. There are a few predefined functions in package
"Mpp::Rewrite", in which your code also runs, you can use for this. These return true if they did
something so you can combine them as in:
--rename='cwd( 1 ) || &home || &usr'
&cwd
cwd number
cwd number, name[, separator]
Removes the current working directory from the beginning of path. With a number, also replaces
parent directories that many levels up with the right number of ../ directories, where applicable.
In this case you can give an alternate name, like a piled up ':' instead of '..' and additionally an
alternate separator like '' instead of '/'. In the first case you might get :/:/a/b, in the second
an even shorter ::a/b instead of ../../a/b. Passing a number is useful if you draw in stuff from
neighbouring trees. Or you have a src directory, where most of the action is, so you call
makeppgraph there, but want to see the relation to your other directories too.
If you give no "--rename" option, &cwd is the default. Should you want no renaming, you can give
some perlcode like "--rename=1" that does nothing.
&dir
This one is a great reducer of graph complexity. It reduces every file to its directory. That
amounts to the question: "Files from which directory depend on files from which other directory?"
Note that while the dependency graph is always acyclic (else makepp wouldn't know where to start
building), that is not true of this reduced view. E.g. if dir1/a depends on dir2/b and dir2/a on
dir1/b that will display as a mutual dependency between dir1 and dir2. Since a cyclic graph has no
obvious starting point, the layout may be odd.
Unlike the other functions in this section, this is not exclusive with the others. So you may not
want to logically combine it:
--rename='&dir; &cwd || &home'
&home
Replaces your home directory with ~/.
&makepp
Replaces the makepp installation directory with |m|.
&suf
suf number
This one is also a great reducer of graph complexity. It reduces every file that has a suffix to an
asterisk and that suffix. So you can see which kinds of files depend on which other kinds. With an
argument of 0 it leaves the first character of the directory, provided it is one of "/", "~" or "|"
(as put in by &home or &usr if you called those first). With a positive argument, it leaves that
many directory levels at the beginning. With a negative argument, it removes that many directory
levels at the end. So for /a/b/c/d/e/x.y you get:
&suf *.y
suf 0 /*.y
suf 1 /a/*.y
suf 2 /a/b/*.y
suf -1 /a/b/c/d/*.y
suf -2 /a/b/c/*.y
For a relative a/b/c/d/e/x.y you get:
&suf *.y
suf 0 *.y
suf 1 a/*.y
suf -1 a/b/c/d/*.y
&usr
Under /, /usr, /usr/local, /usr/X11, /usr/X11R6, /usr/X11R7 or /opt, for any of the directories bin,
etc, include, lib or share, the initials of these words are concatenated between bars.
E.g. /usr/local/bin/foobar becomes |ulb|foobar or /usr/include/net/if.h becomes |ui|net/if.h. Note
that `l' stands for `local' when between two letters and for `lib' as the last letter.
Merging
This is the second name rewriting that occurs, if the "-m, --merge" option is given. This API is still
under development! Currently the target is passed in $_ and the dependency as an argument. If perlcode
returns a value, that value replaces both the target and the dependency, merging them into one node. A
few predefined functions can help you:
c2o For any C/C++ source and the resulting .o file, merge them into one node, by adding to the source
path a suffix of ">o" like some/where/foo.cc>o, even if the .o file is in another directory.
exe For any .o file and the resulting executable of the same notdir basename without a suffix or with
.exe, merge them into one node, by adding an asterisk to the .o file. This will not currently work
together with c2o.
x2 For any pair of files with the same name, usually a header or library published to a central
directory, merge them into one node, by adding *2 to the dependency.
ENVIRONMENT
Makeppgraph looks at the following environment variable:
$MAKEPPGRAPHFLAGS
Any flags in this environment variable are interpreted as command line options before any explicit
options. Quotes are interpreted like in makefiles.
AUTHOR
Daniel Pfeiffer (occitan@esperanto.org)
perl v5.32.0 2021-01-06 MAKEPPGRAPH(1)