Hi guys,

I'm trying to find the width of a directed acyclic graph... as represented by an arbitrarily ordered list of nodes, without even an adjacency list.

The graph/list is for a parallel GNU Make-like workflow manager that uses files as its criteria for execution order. Each node has a list of source files and target files. We have a hash table in place so that, given a file name, the node which produces it can be determined. In this way, we can figure out a node's parents by examining the nodes which generate each of its source files using this table.

That is the ONLY ability I have at this point, without changing the code severely. The code has been in public use for a while, and the last thing we want to do is to change the structure significantly and have a bad release. And no, we don't have time to test rigorously (I am in an academic environment). Ideally we're hoping we can do this without doing anything more dangerous than adding fields to the node.

I'll be posting a community-wiki answer outlining my current approach and its flaws. If anyone wants to edit that, or use it as a starting point, feel free. If there's anything I can do to clarify things, I can answer questions or post code if needed.

Thanks!

EDIT: For anyone who cares, this will be in C. Yes, I know my pseudocode is in some horribly botched Python look-alike. I'm sort of hoping the language doesn't really matter.