[Ns-developers] notes on a few project development issues

[Tom Henderson]

I've been working on a few things that I'd like to announce and/or 
solicit comments:

i) nsnam wiki.  John has set this up at:
http://nsnam.isi.edu/nsnam/

I have not announced it yet to ns-users, as I was hoping to build it up 
a bit first.  So far, Sam Jansen did some initial edits in the Main Page 
and contributed code sections, and I have ported over the ns-users FAQ 
and started a "Developer Information" and "Developer FAQ" page (which 
I'd like any comments on).  I'd like at least to get something started 
on the "red links" at the Main Page before announcing the wiki more 
broadly, so that there is some structure against which the at-large 
community can contribute.

Presently, the wiki is open to anyone who logs in, and I'd encourage 
people to contribute as they see fit.

ii) sourceforge Tasks and Tracker

The tracker should be functional now, allowing a sourceforge user to add 
bugs.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=149743

I started two "Tasks" to track broader issues that seem to transcend an 
individual bug report; one for nam-1 and one for ns-2:
http://sourceforge.net/pm/?group_id=149743

I put down some tasks for nam-1 but nothing yet for ns-2.

iii) Daily builds and validation

I have enabled daily pulls of the cvs tree, storing the tarballs at ISI. 
  These are available from the web page as before.

Separately, I've been able to automate daily validations on multiple 
"compile farm" machines at Sourceforge.  I am wondering what people 
might want done with the output summaries.  Previously, these used to be 
mailed around to the developers, and more recently it seems that ISI has 
just been dumping the output into a directory:
http://www.isi.edu/~haldar/VINT/VALIDATION/

Now, the way that sourceforge puts controls on their compile farm 
servers makes it difficult to dump output into a text file available via 
  HTTP to the outside world, but they do enable (with restrictions) 
outbound email from these servers, so one possibility is to create a new 
mailing list (e.g., nsnam-validate at lists.sourceforge.net) for short 
summaries to be emailed nightly.  One possible advantage to such a list 
is that it might allow additional 3rd-party validators to run things in 
parallel (for example, someone might set up a Cygwin machine for this 
and want to provide that output also).  I would suggest making it 
separate from the ns-developers list, as it probably is a much smaller 
community of interest.  Any interest in such a list?

Tom