[Ns-developers] Learning Bridge has been merged

[Mathieu Lacage]

On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 16:57 +0100, Gustavo Carneiro wrote:


>         I would be happy to see users volunteer to make "stable"
>         releases of
>         ns-3.1 as ns-3.1.x if they think it is a good use of their
>         resources.
>         i.e., if you are willing to do it, I am sure we can help you
>         to do so.
> 
> If this was a distributed work among all developers, maybe it'd work
> (bug fixes are committed only into ns-3-stable, and pulled/merged
> later into ns-3-dev).
> 
> But a far easier approach would be to keep a single branch with at
> least some degree of API stability.  The effort of maintaining API
> stability is very low IMHO.  Now, you do not want to provide API
> stability.  Fine, maybe you have better things to do.  But on top of
> that you are stopping me from providing backward compatibility for the
> code that I am contributing.

What do you mean by "you are stopping me from providing backward
compatibility" ? If you wish to maintain an ns-3.1.x branch, I see no
reason why I would stop you from doing it. I would, in fact, find this
pretty seriously cool.

>         > Case in point.  A fellow Phd student was using ns-3.0.11 for
>         his
>         > research.  He wants to try TCP instead of UDP, but there
>         were some
>         > problems with TCP in ns-3.0.11.  He has to switch to ns-3.1,
>         now, but
>         > I am afraid the task is much more complex than his C++
>         skills will
>         > allow, and so I have the task waiting for me, to help him
>         out.  I'll
>         > probably spend at least a couple of days adapting to the new
>         API.  And
>         > it is really _tedious_ work, the suicide thought inducing
>         kind :|
>         
>         
>         If users used pre-3.1 releases and complain about porting to
>         3.1, there
>         is nothing we can do about this.
> 
> Yes, I know.  But if this is an example of things to come, we will
> have problems.  In my case, if API is too unstable, I will stop
> tracking ns-3-dev after ns-3.2 (I want ns-3.2 for the python
> bindings).  And then I would be unable to contribute any code to
> ns-3-dev.

I think that, once the python bindings in ns-3-dev build for all
developers (it seems that there are these tricky python2.3 issues you
tracked down with craig), you will have two options:
  - ask those who break the python bindings to fix them either by
running the automatic generator or doing hand edits
  - keep maintaining the python bindings yourself when APIs change

I would be fine with either solution and I think that you should pick
the one which works best for you. i.e., if you want us to fix the python
bindings when we break them, I will support that strongly.

regards,
Mathieu