[Ns-developers] build system proposal

[Mathieu Lacage]

On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 12:37 +0100, Gustavo Carneiro wrote:

>         
>         The current proposal should deal with this problem by
>         delegating the
>         version checking to the 'install' script. i.e., the waf script
>         in
>         ns-3-dev should check that the current environment has the
>         correct
>         version of all programs by running ../install check. (use a
>         different
>         name for the script if you wish).
> 
> Why are you planning to remove the nice user friendly configuration
> tests in waf and instead make waf invoke an external command to check
> those things?  Besides reinventing the wheel, then we need to create a

Because the 'install' script will need the version checking logic
somewhere and I see little point in implementing that logic twice, once
in waf and once in the 'install' script.

Please, don't be so confrontational by painting me as being the evil
person who is suggesting to remove 'nice user-friendly' configuration
tests because I am not suggesting to remove them. I am merely suggesting
to _move_ them.

>  protocol between ../install.py and the waf script, so that the waf
> build system disables components with missing dependencies.

yes.

> I thought this 'allinone' directory was an extra layer on top of
> ns-3-dev?  If you start crippling the waf configuration detection then
> ns-3-dev will essentially become interlocked with ns-3-allinone, which
> is something I think is a very bad idea.

Yes, but, it's called a 'compromise' to get something simple working for
a vast majority of people given the set of requirements tom set forth
(no network access during ./waf, etc.).

> IMHO all external dependencies detection should still be present
> inside ns-3-dev, for those that do not want to use 'allinone'.

It should be trivial to ignore the version checking in ns-3-dev if
ns-3-dev cannot find the file ../install.py. 

regards,
Mathieu