Improve the error message when `dot` is not installed on the system

[carlos-molina]

Improve the error message when `dot` is not installed on the system

[samoht]

sh: 1: dot: not found

This message means that you don't have the dot executable installed on your system. You need to install graphviz if you want to see generate the graph from the .dot file. On ubuntu that should be a matter of apt-get install graphviz.

I'll try to improve the error message.

[carlos-molina]

Good and thanks for your help. Yet notice that I did not want to generate anything or fiddle with graphics--I only wanted to dump the state of my storage!

[samoht]

Well, irmin dump thestate dump the low-level state of your storage as a graph (it's hard to display something more meaningful). You can use irmin list or irmin tree if you want to see high-level view of your store.

[avsm]

Did you have anything else in mind for what "irmin dump" should output, Carlos? The Dot format is the graph representation of the database, so a pure terminal dump aside from that is tough.

Could just dump the dot to stdout instead of invoking the shell command, I guess.

On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:56, Thomas Gazagnaire [email protected] wrote:

Well, irmin dump thestate dump the low-level state of your storage as a graph (it's hard to display something more meaningful). You can use irmin list or irmin tree if you want to see high-level view of your store.

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[carlos-molina]

You're right Thomas, the installation of 'graphviz' solves the problem. I only have three minor observations:

1. The user needs to execute apt-get under sudo privileges. Like this:

% sudo apt-get install graphviz

and then he or she needs to provide an admin password.

My concern here is that the installation process that I have been following involves the execution of several commands under 'sudo'.

This rules out potential users of Irminsule that do not have access to administration passwords of their Linux machines. I guess that we are ruling out most of the student population.

I you think that this is good idea, we can, at some point, explore and develop an alternative installation procedure that does not involves 'sudo'.

2. $ open thestate.png` does not work in Linux. You need to use 'display' instead of 'open'.

3. In response to Anil comments: Did you have anything else in mind for what "irmin dump" should output, Carlos? ...

All depends on who (people or programmes) will use the dump. If it is for people to see (naked eye) the graph on the screen, then we need software to trim the tree so that I can select to display only specific branches, such as my current version of my DB.

I can see that my example of DB has only three leaves and I have altered only one of them. Yet the png graph is already large (nearly an A4 page), hard to look at and even harder to reason about.

[samoht]

Fixed now.