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

[Mathieu Lacage]

On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 14:57 -0700, craigdo at ee.washington.edu wrote:
> > > 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.

Feel free to improve it: it's a wiki.

> 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

You might need to add Python to your path:
PATH=$PATH:/c/Python25

I also noticed that mingw seems to buffer completely the output of ./waf
configure which means that you must wait until configuration is
completed to see its output. Not a very pretty bug :/

> 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 ...

So, let's do this. If gustavo wants to spend time on it, he is more than
welcome but it seems more sensible for us to focus on cygwin.

Mathieu