Why free software is good

Some time ago I posted here the first of a series of tutorials about the use of Graphviz for producing an Harris matrix. The second part I'm writing is a bit more technical, and shows how to use the Python language to create a custom application that makes recording easier and faster for most users.

The Python-Graphviz bindings I chose are the pygraphviz ones. One thing I immediately noticed was that a method for using the tred command was missing. And I had just showed you how much it was useful...

So, I filed an enhancement request for the pygraphviz library. Shortly after that, I wrote a small patch that implemented a tred() method. And a few days later, one of the developers came out with a much better patch and implementation of the whole thing.

This changeset was included in the 0.36 release of pygraphviz, which came out on January, 13th 2008. Today I found the update for Debian Sid in the repositories.

I like free software. And, yes, part 2 will be soon ready.