[Ns-developers] [ns3] trace path documentation

[Mathieu Lacage]

On Wed, 2008-04-16 at 08:01 -0700, Tom Henderson wrote:

> "This object is accessible through the following paths with Config::Set 
> and Config::Connect:
>      /NodeList/[i]/DeviceList/[i]/$ns3PointToPointNetDevice"
> 
> Are you considering now to move away from full TypeId to the above 
> (based on Gustavo's posts earlier this week), or is your documentation 
> not fully functional?

The documentation is functional: it generates valid paths and it is now
easy to change the look of the paths it generates. I was waiting to get
feedback before making changes to the kind of paths it generates and
changing the kind of path Config::Set/Connect takes.

> I suspect it is the latter, but as you know, it would still make me 
> happier to support paths like the above instead of e.g. 
> /ns3::NodeListPriv::NodeList/.

I do understand your desire to make paths look pretty (ier). This desire
has to be balanced against the need to be able to explain the structure
of these paths. I really think that the example above is much easier to
describe and explain than the current paths we use so, we have to
balance these two conflicting requirements. 

Unless, of course, someone comes up with a better proposal which
improves the paths with regard to both requirements. That, however,
seems unlikely so, we need to make a decision and, if _I_ had to make
that decision now, I would pick the ugly and verbose but more explicit
version because I have a better handle on how I could explain it to
users who want to copy/paste the paths from the documentation but who
also want to understand what they are doing. I am not going to push very
hard for that, but I already spent a lot of time considering every
alternative I could think of.

regards,
Mathieu