TorXviz Downloads

Even though the downloads here are functional, the main reason for the current contents is to experiment with the packaging mechanism. We are experimenting with self-contained starpacks that should run 'out of the box'. Don't be afraid of a few debugging print statements at startup.

AniFSM/AniDot

Right now we are offering self-contained starpacks that should run 'out of the box'. Each of them contains:
  • the tcl scripts for the client
  • the tcl scripts for the server
  • shared library Tcldot and TkSpline extensions for a number of platforms
  • a windows tclkit executable (i.e. the client is a console application, such that we can talk to standard input and standard output. For the server we need graphics, and thus tclkit.)

When the starkit and starpacks are run they will start the client program. This will try to find a running server, and if found, connect to it. When it cannot find a running server, or can not connect to it, it will decide that it needs to start the server. To start the server, it will start its own starkit or starpack again, on the background, with a '-server' option, to run the server code. On windows this is slightly more complex because there the client must be run as console application, such that we can talk to standard input and standard output, whereas the server has to be a window application, to show the window. On unix a single tclkit program can function in both these roles. On windows there are separate programs: tlckitsh for the console app and tclkit for the window showing app. That is why we included the windows tclkit in the starkit and starpacks. When the server is started on windows from a starpack we use a small utility script (also copied to temporary place on-disk) to mount the vfs inside the starpack -- it seems that tclkit can not directly be given a starpack as argument.

To be able to load the shared libraries the self-contained programs will, when run, create a temporary on-disk directory to store these. It will not automatically clean this up. The user name is not part of the directory name, so there might be clashes if multiple users run it.
Ideas how to improve on this are welcome!

Installation

  • download
  • on unix you then have to unpack the gzip-ed tar files, but that should be all
  • run: anidot &
  • run: anidot one-of-your-files.dot &
  • run: anidot and use the animation/editing language to animate/edit the graph

Limitations

  • for linux. On a very recent suse version we have experienced what seemed to be a shared-lib loading problem with the Tcldot extension. It turned out to be a libpng.so shared library dependency: the tcldot.so we include here was built with libpng.so.2, whereas the above mentioned suse system only has libpng.so.3. Since we do not use the libpng functionality anyway we resorted to the ugly hack of brushing out the '.2' part of the 'libpng.so.2' name in the tcldot.so file, such that it will load fine as long as there is a libpng.so file, even if it has the wrong version. However, as soon as one tries to use the libpng functionality (which we do not, in anidot) and the library version is wrong, it will fail miserably.
  • for windows we included the tcldot shared library for windows provided by Michael Schlenker. It has one limitation: the command to write the graph in various formats does not work.

Documentation

For the manual see anifsm manual page as part of the on-line TorX manual (slightly out of date -- the syntax for the 'dot edge' command has changed from
dot edge src dst attrname attrval attrname attrval ...
to
dot edge src->dst attrname attrval attrname attrval ...
)

Packages

Feedback

Any comments, about packaging and about the actual application are appreciated at Axel.Belinfante@cs.utwente.nl
This page has last been updated by Axel Belinfante on Wednesday, 8 March 2006.