[Ns-developers] building NS-3 with waf

[Gustavo Carneiro]

  I have been playing with building NS-3 with waf[1].  What I have so far is
here:

      http://telecom.inescporto.pt/~gjc/ns-3-waf/

  To me, waf appears:

   1. Orders of magnitude faster than scons;
   2. Better user interface (try "waf build -p", you'll get a progress
   bar!);
   3. Simpler api for developers to use;
   4. Clean separation between configuration and building;
   5. More high-level than scons, in particular regarding installation
   prefix and directories;
   6. You can ship waf with NS-3 (we need to ship just one 100 KB file),
   thus making NS-3 more easy to build (only python needed then, rather than
   python + scons).

  Of course some of the flaws of scons are already taken care of by the '
build.py' framework provided in NS.  But in my opinion maintaining such a
framework for just one project is hard work we can easily avoid by using
waf.

  My code only builds the main ns-3 source code (the 'src' dir) and one
sample program.  No docs either.  I just wanted to evaluate waf, for now,
and gather feedback.

  Comments?

[1] http://freehackers.org/~tnagy/bksys.html
-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
"The universe is always one step beyond logic."