Exploration of using graphwiz

[pepyakin]

Working on #1297 made me curious what's the experience of using graphviz of diagrams.

They do look nice when rendered, but otherwise unreadable in plain markdown and are rather indirect when drawing. Also, not sure if every diagram would be drawable with it and it will make us into the the graphviz framework.

All in all, I have a conflicting feelings about this. Therefore, feel free to close.

[rphmeier]

I'm for this, it's fine if it's not readable within the markdown IMO

[coriolinus]

Agree, the rendered output is a lot nicer than ASCII-art, and IMO the relative ease-of-use of graphviz will encourage contributors to add more diagrams.

[montekki]

Awesome the only thing that worries me is the dark color scheme in the docs. And I can't test it bc mdbook-graphviz does not seem to work on my box

[riusricardo]

I like this change, it makes it much better. I don't see any blocker.

[rphmeier]

Will test on my machine, worrying that it doesn't work for @montekki

[montekki]

fwiw here is the log (graphviz is installed):

2020-06-22 14:11:48 [INFO] (mdbook::book): Book building has started
2020-06-22 14:11:48 [WARN] (mdbook::preprocess::cmd): The command wasn't found, is the "graphviz" preprocessor installed?
2020-06-22 14:11:48 [WARN] (mdbook::preprocess::cmd):   Command: mdbook-graphviz
2020-06-22 14:11:48 [INFO] (mdbook::book): Running the html backend
2020-06-22 14:11:48 [WARN] (mdbook::preprocess::cmd): The command wasn't found, is the "graphviz" preprocessor installed?

[rphmeier]

You installed cargo install mdbook-graphviz but it can't find the binary?

[montekki]

yes

[montekki]

Reinstalling fails with

  = note: cc: fatal error: cannot read spec file ‘./specs’: Is a directory
          compilation terminated.


error: aborting due to previous error

error: could not compile `pulldown-cmark`.

To learn more, run the command again with --verbose.
warning: build failed, waiting for other jobs to finish...

[riusricardo]

@montekki You may need to install the graphviz binary, not just mdbook-graphviz

EDIT: I just saw that you have the graphviz binary installed 😕

[rphmeier]

Does mdbook-graphviz show up in the $PATH? If so then I'm not sure why the mdbook would not be able to find it, since it is just running subcommands.

[montekki]

Works for me now, it turned out some packages could not be built because of an issue with cargo and environent variables (rust-lang/cargo#5796)