I was inspired to revisit this by a discussion in the chatterbox with gohaku, tye and Enlil.

Looks like your second guess was right, Anonymous Monk.

I can't for the life of me figure out what's going on in Graph::Traversal, which is the base class for Graph::BFS. The POD reads %param documentation to be written, which is a little disappointing.

However, I was able to address the problem you're trying to solve using SSSP_Dijkstra(), which also is a bit short on the POD:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Graph::Directed;

# Construct the graph

# This is a diagram of the graph we'll construct
# note there are two possible paths from D to J
# we want D->M->J since it's shorter than D->M->P->J

# D -> M -> P
#      |    |
#      \    v
#        -> J


my $G = new Graph::Directed;
$G = $G->add_edge("dave","mark");
$G = $G->add_edge("mark","paul");
$G = $G->add_edge("mark","john");
$G = $G->add_edge("paul","john");

# use the built-in SSSP_Dijkstra method
# creates a new graph, rooted at "dave"
my $SSP = $G->SSSP_Dijkstra("dave");  

# this returns $SSP, which is another graph with every vertex
# reachable from "dave".

# Note that the "path" attribute for each vertex is a listref
# indicating the shortest way to reach that path (using Dijkstra's
# algorithm) from 'dave'.  This is not documented in the 
# Graph::Base documentation.

# find path to "john"
my @path2John = @{$SSP->get_attribute('path', "john")};

for (@path2John) {
  print;
  print "\n";
}


__END__

dave
mark
john
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