Comment # 10 on bug 1210148 from Michael Andres

Right, but this refers to old style solver testcases using .xml-files. New
style uses yaml. But more importantly, there is no more support for
'<graphic>', neither in xml nor in yaml.

A solver testcase contains information about all packages and all their
dependencies. This is the same information we have available inside zypper to
resolve your queries. The information the solver uses for the dependency
resolution.

It would not be hard for zypper to compute a dependency graph and write it to a
.dot-file[1]. This is indeed far easier done inside zypp, than trying to
retrieve and combine all the information via queries.

The problem - as always - is to layout and render the graph in a way so you can
recognize the information you are looking for. I once rendered `what requires
glibc' with Gephi[2] and the result looks more like a painting. For sure
nothing you would like to be written to a terminal, so I pinned it to my wall.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_%28graph_description_language%29
[2] https://gephi.org/



Regarding '<graphic>':
Years ago, yast(qt) provided a libqdialogsolver1 package which was able to
layout and render a dependency graph. Jano used this widget to implement the
'<graphic>' feature. At this time the libzypp-testsuite-tools package also
contained a QT4 based application named deptestomatic.multi, which was able to
show this simple graph and YASTs package selector used it as well. But
libqdialogsolver1 was dropped in 2014 and so the deptestomatic.multi. The
layout was too simple to be usefull if the tree became a bit more complex.