[Ns-developers] Learning Bridge has been merged

[Gustavo Carneiro]

2008/7/23 Mathieu Lacage <mathieu.lacage at sophia.inria.fr>:

>
> On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 17:44 +0100, Gustavo Carneiro wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> >         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.
> >
> > Hey, don't trick me into maintaining a ns-3.1.x branch, alone! :P
> >
> > I was talking about the route of _not_ branching and instead try to
> > keep some API stability in the single branch.  What I meant was that
>
> The issue is not branching or not: the issue is who gets to maintain the
> stable branch. I am not a volunteer. You seem to not want to do it
> alone. Who else is sufficiently interested in this to do it ? _that_
> seems to be the real issue.


The real issue is that, if we branch, developers will stick to a stable
branch, develop things on top of it, and will not be able to contribute code
to the development branch.  Game over.

So I think it's not (only) an issue of who maintains the stable branch.
Branching has its own inherent problems.  API stability would be of far
greater value IMHO.


>
>
> [snip]
>
> >         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),
> >
> > These python issues should be fixed now, as far as I could test.
>
> ok
>
> >         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.
> >
> > Sure, but I am concerned about C++ models, not Python.
>
> ok. That still leaves the above question unanswered though: which way
> you would you want to pick to go forward with the python stuff ?


OK, this question deserves its own thread; you are mixing unrelated subjects
in on email.

But to answer the question, I think both approaches are valid and can be
used together:

  - If someone hand customizes the API defs files by hand, I'll have to
check whether the gccxml based parser is able to automatically pick up the
same change, so that it isn't lost next time APIs are rescanned;

  - If someone has tons of API changes and asks my help for scanning, I may
be able to do it in my laptop and commit the result.  I'm usually a helpful
guy, if I'm not too busy... :-)

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
INESC Porto, Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit
"The universe is always one step beyond logic." -- Frank Herbert