[Ns-developers] build stuff and downloading external deps

[Sam Jansen]

I think that's a great idea Mathieu.

One of the problems I remember as an undergraduate in university was getting
any software that needed internet access to work - we could only connect to
the outside via an HTTP proxy, which lots of stuff didn't support. It would
be a shame to make ns-3 hard for students in similar situations to compile.

2008/9/3 Mathieu Lacage <mathieu.lacage at sophia.inria.fr>

> hi,
>
> While trying to look at some of the nsc build issues, it occured to me
> that we do a lot of things when running waf which require network access
> and that this can be problematic in a lot of situations (for example,
> such as yesterday when the nsc repo server times out) where network
> access is spotty. I noticed also that we have quite a bit of different
> code to download different bits and pieces:
>  - pybindgen if we don't find the right version for python bindings
>  - ns-3-dev-traces if we want to run regression tests
>  - nsc if we want to use nsc tcp stacks
>
> To summarize, I would like to split all the network access from our
> build stuff proper and:
>
>  1) provide a small download.py file (find a better name if you care)
> which will attempt to download missing bits and pieces, depending
> whether this is a release tarball or a snapshot from the ns-3-dev main
> tree. It could have a couple of command-line options which say which
> bits to download and/or update
>
>  2) rework the build scripts to not download anything, try to find
> things under the current dir, disable the feature if they can't find it
> there, and provide a --with-foo=/location switch for each of the
> optional stuff to look for these optional features in a separate
> location.
>
> If I hear no loud complaints about the basic idea, I will work on that
> starting tomorrow.
>
> Comments and suggestions welcome,
> Mathieu
>
>