[Ns-developers] [ns3] trace path documentation

[Mathieu Lacage]

On Wed, 2008-04-16 at 15:46 +0000, Tom Henderson wrote:

> Another question I had was regarding Gustavo's point that we are
> creating a back-door public interface to non-public objects.

I think that I missed that point.

> - should it be permissible, or should we hook attributes only to
> public objects and have the private objects retrieve values from the
> public objects?

I think that it should be permissible. It is actually a feature that
the kind of "path" we are talking about reflects the details of the
implementation structure of our codebase: the previous implementation of
the same feature (the TraceResolver code) tried to build a different
"path" structure on top of the implementation itself and the result was
that almost no one had any idea of what the "path" structure was.
Arguably, you still need to understand the details of our object
implements and relationships but, that is easier than the former.

> - should retrieving a PointerAttr to a private object be disallowed?
> Or is this a non-issue because the class will not be found anyway via
> the public headers and compilation will fail?

You might be still able to do a lot of useful things out of an object
you retrieve with a PointerAttr because you know that it derives from
the Object base class, so you can call GetObject or SetAttribute.

> 
> If we stay with the full TypeId for path, should we consider to
> refactor the node list so that we do not have
> ns3::NodeListPriv::NodeList but instead ns3::NodeList?

I would be fine with this if it were possible: I will see if it can be
done.

Mathieu