[Ns-developers] Learning Bridge has been merged

[Tom Henderson]

Mathieu Lacage wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 19:02 +0100, Gustavo Carneiro wrote:
> 
> 
>> 1. optional features are good (modular programming), and 2. you
>> shouldn't rely on compile-time checking so much, unit tests are the
>> way to go if you want to really assert things work.
> 
> I think that the above pretty well summarizes our disagreement: I think
> that compile-time checking should always win over runtime checking. 

We opted for a runtime checking framework (interface aggregation) to try 
to solve these types of base class maintenance issues, so it seems 
against the grain of ns-3 to take the above position against runtime 
checking.  This seems to be a possible use case of that framework since 
we are implementing essentially a query interface (SupportsPromiscuous) 
directly in the base class.

I have been hoping with ns-3 that we could seriously cut down on the 
types of users email such as "can someone help me make this model based 
on ns-2.27 work with ns-2.33?"

Regardless of how we decide on this particular instance, we have to 
decide, for the long term, how we are going to maintain these base 
classes, and when "long term" starts if not now.

- Tom