feature request: newick format

[mkborregaard]

Do you, or would you, support reading graphs specified in a Newick format? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newick_format ? Perhaps in the context of MetaGraphs (as the Newick format contains some metadata)?

[sbromberger]

We don't currently have this, but it looks interesting if you'd like to give it a shot. My advice is to create it as a standalone package - we're currently rethinking how we provide different file formats for graphs, and the current idea is to have several packages in a single repo (now that we can do this in Pkg3).

[mkborregaard]

Oh 😞 Yeah I think having a standalone package just for a Newick parser is going rather overboard on the whole package-splitting thing. Especially given that you already have a dedicated GraphIO package :joy:

I'll probably just put it in my downstream package that uses (/will most likely switch to using) MetaGraphs instead. There are already a number of packages with Newick parsers in them.

I just felt that, when using MetaGraphs, this functionality might nest nicely in the graph ecosystem.

[simonschoelly]

If you import loadgraph, loadgraphs and savegraph from LightGraphs and implement them for the Newick format, it should be easy to add this to the LightGraphs ecosystem later.

[sbromberger]

To be clear - the idea is to get rid of graphio as a package entirely and have each format be its own package but in a monorepo. That way, for example, if you need Graph6 you don’t need to have JLD installed.

[mkborregaard]

Hm OK - I'll have a look at the approach suggest by @simonschoelly