[Ns-developers] Ns-3.2 Daily Bug Status for Monday, September8, 2008

[craigdo@ee.washington.edu]

> > I think we need a HOWTO that describes how to set up a 
> MinGW environment
> > "correctly" -- so that one can follow the instructions and 
> just have it
> > work, rather than having to figure it all out by debugging 
> cryptic error
> > messages :-)
> 
> http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/index.php/User_FAQ#How_to_configure_cygwin
> http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/index.php/User_FAQ#How_to_configure_mingw
> 

This kind of document drives me crazy.

I "grabbed" MinGW, MSYS, Python and Mercurial; but I must've grabbed them
the wrong way since the regression tests don't work.  If there is a specific
correct way to "grab" them, and a specific way to set them up, we should be
more specific.  This kind of document is great for reminding someone who has
done it many times which URL to use.  It's not very good for explaining what
that "much more work" phrase means.  What I meant was a step-by-step recipe
to construct an environment, download, build and verify ns-3 for people like
me who had never used MinGW before.

> I should point out that our supported windows platform is Cygwin, not
> mingw (I did not try to find where this was discussed but I 
> know that it
> was because at one point, I was very much in favor of mingw 
> and gave up
> on it). MingW seems to somewhat work but I don't think we 
> should invest
> any ressources in it or bother with writing documentation about it.
> i.e., if someone wants to do this kind of support, I am all 
> for it, but
> I see little point in spreading our current resources on two win32
> platforms.

I agree.  I've already suggested bailing on MinGW ...

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