[Ns-developers] ns transition to Sourceforge

[Tom Henderson]

After discussing with John, Sally, and others, we've decided to try to 
move ns-2 source code to sourceforge.  Is this OK with the development team?

Since there is no current funding for ns-2 development, we decided that 
a moderated community development model, such as many open source 
projects use, might make sense.  Presently, otcl and tclcl are hosted at 
sourceforge, and they have a well-established set of tools (CVS, bug 
tracker) that can be of use.  ISI has volunteered to continue to provide 
the mailing lists.

To move to sourceforge, a few things have to happen.  We would probably 
create both an ns-2 and a nam project.  The www/ pages could also move 
to those projects.  I'll take the action item to work these issues with 
sourceforge:

i) Richard Stallman has been prodding those organizations with non-free 
software licenses to change them. There are indications that this will 
be successful.  As I understand it, sourceforge will only take free 
software projects.  I do not know whether we will need to wait for that 
issue to be resolved before moving.

ii) ideally, it would be best to import our CVS history; I'll work with 
sourceforge on transitioning that

iii) coordinate the migration (making sure that we do not do checkins 
during the move; setting up nightly validation again, etc.)

Along with this, I'm encouraging other interested developers (outside of 
the original ns core team) to sign up; hence my mail message concerning 
ns-developers list this morning.  We should discuss a process for 
bringing new developers onto the team, and a process for accepting and 
validating contributed code.  I'll have a few suggestions for that in a 
later post.

Tom