[Ns-developers] ns-3.5 planning

[Tom Henderson]

With the release of ns-3.4 yesterday, I would like to look forward to
the next few months and solicit some discussion on how we are doing and
where we are headed.

I am excited by the enthusiastic response to our Google Summer of Code
project, both from a mentor and student perspective.  Thanks to Joe
Kopena for managing the many inquiries about GSOC applications.

Where are things headed for ns-3.5?  First, Mathieu volunteered to be
release manager for the next release, so I'd like to accept Mathieu's
offer and thank Raj for doing this work for ns-3.4. From my perspective,
I would like to focus on a few development/maintenance priorities for
ns-3.5. Craig and I are going to prioritize these issues in the next
release cycle.

1) IP refactoring. We have discussed this for a while now, and I've been
prototyping some ideas in the tomh/ns-3-ip repository. From my point of
view, we need to try to address some of these issues to allow people the
flexibility to do interesting network- and routing-level research in the
future. What has become clear is that the present prototype is becoming
too large for a single merge event, so Mathieu and I have discussed a
staged merge process. I will send out more email on this later, but this
(along with IPv6 merge) is really my main development priority for April.

2) Code contributions. Our intent all along has been to encourage and
support model development and contributions from researchers, and we can
see from the code repository that we have a lot of work in the pipeline.
I would like to improve our processes for ensuring timely reviews and
clear merge guidelines to contributors. To that end, we are going to
look at a reviewboard application for managing code reviews, and we will
try to establish a regular process among ns-3 maintainers to distribute
reviews and provide feedback. I will also try to improve guidelines for
code contributors and address the coding style questions that have come
up recently. It would be great to start to merge more of the work we are
seeing in the many repositories on our code server.

3) Validation. A primary goal of the project is to support not just new
models but validated models. Presently, we have drifted into the state
of equating regression tests with validation, and relying too heavily on
trace-based regression tests. We haven't yet exploited the new ns-3
tracing framework to write better validation tests and link them into
our regression testing framework. Again, I will have more to say on this
in a separate email, but I would like to harness the recent activity on
802.11 validation and define some best current practices and good
examples of how to contribute validation results and programs to the
ns-3 project.

The above are my priorities for the next release cycle. But, I would
also like to hear back from users and developers as to what features,
bugs, or other project issues need attention, from your perspective, to
help us set priorities and roadmaps for the rest of the year. If you
have concrete merge proposals also for ns-3.5, now is the time to
socialize them so we can build the big picture plan.

- Tom