Dependency Graphs

GnuCash is a complex project. To keep some structure in the code, the source files are grouped into targets. Higher level targets can depend on lower level targets. That means, the lower level targets must be built before the higher level target can be built. Given the complexity, it may be challenging to get a view of these dependencies.

Luckily cmake (our build system generation tool) has built-in support for the graphviz dependency visualization tool.

To use it you can use these commands:

mkdir graphviz && cd graphviz
cmake --graphviz=graph ..
dot graph -Tsvg -o graph.svg

dot options

-Grankdir=LR for horizontal layout,

-Tpng to get a png (change output file extension to png as well)

This will result in lots of files in the graphviz directory. The one we're interested in is graph.svg.

Below you'll find two examples.