#5 Class hierarchy/collaboration graphs

[Stefan Quandt]

As I am used to doxygen to generate C++ documentation
I miss
- class hierarchy and collaboration graphs (inheritance,
containment, and class references variables of a class with other
classes)
- module dependency (import) graphs

May be the dot tool (www.graphviz.org) can be used for this (like
doxygen does).

[Edward Loper]

Logged In: YES
user_id=195958

It would be possible to do import graphs & class hierarchy
graphs. But collaboration graphs are much harder, given
the fact that python is dynamically typed.

In particular, given a class, you can't determine much
about the type of its instance variables, or what other
classes its methods interact with, without doing some
serious type inference. So.. if you want collaboration
graphs, you'll need to come up with some concrete details
on what they should include, and how we could actually
access that information (via either parsing or
introspection).

One idea might be to do collaboration graphs based only on
the information that's given in docstring fields about the
types of variables & parameters.. But then the
collaboration graph would most likely be "incomplete",
unless you're very careful about marking the type of
everything.

Anyway, ideas are welcome on how to generate interesting
graphs other than imports & class hierarchies.

[Edward Loper]

Logged In: YES
user_id=195958

Much of this has been implemented in epydoc 3.0. Work on
extending it will continue.