[Ns-developers] ns-3.4 : Final Steps

[Raj Bhattacharjea]

Alright everyone, we are down to less than a week before we plan on
making release candidates for ns-3.4!  There are currently still 10
"blocker" level bugs in the tracker.  I think we can successfully get
these knocked out by Wednesday, since it is my intention to not make a
release candidate until there are no broken behavior bugs that we know
of in ns-3.4.  I want to summarize and coordinate this last round of
"blocker" level bug fixing briefly here on the list.  They break down
into the following categories:

=====TCP======
These make up a whopping 6 out of 10 of the remaining bugs (bugs 198,
424, 425, 426, 427, 499).
I have set up a repository to track the fixes:
http://code.nsnam.org/raj/ns-3-tcp
So far, the tree takes care of 198 and 499.  There is a patch that
will probably go in unmodified for 425 in the tracker.  The rest of
the bugs will be fixed by Monday, when I'll merge my changes from the
temporary raj/ns-3-tcp branch.  I have a handle on all of the bugs and
am confident there will be no slipping.

======Documentation======
There is 1 bug about the tutorial going stale (504).  I suspect that
Craig will get to updating this during the code freeze which starts
Wednesday.  I am fine with documentation fixes during the code-freeze
and RC process.

======Tracing======
There are 2 bugs related to tracing (443 and 505).  The main one is
the trace source rework of bug 443.  It is queued up for merge at:
http://code.nsnam.org/craigdo/ns-3-tracing
This needs a little review, and I have not seen any further comments
from others.  I will be taking a look at the changes today, and
providing feedback to Craig.  I suspect the changes should be ready
for merge as-is, probably Monday.  The one linger question I have is
about bug 505, which is blocked on the rework; I am not sure we can
converge on a solution quickly enough after the tracing work is put
in.

======Wifi Model / Tap Interaction======
There is one bug (510) concerning contradictory behavior in one of
Mathieu's Wifi MAC model.  There was some lengthy discussion about how
the behavior might need to change to support the emu/ Tap bridging use
cases.  The final consensus seems to be simply to fix the
contradictory behavior, and then worry about how to make Tap work
later.  If this is the case, we'll merge this one liner on Monday
(replacing one "true" with "false").


In summary, the TCP fixes are being worked on, and will be merged
Monday.  The main tracing rework and the Wifi inconsistency look like
they can be merged as well on Monday.  This would leave the auxiliary
tracing issue (505) and the tutorial update work to be completed.  The
tracing issue will have to be solved quickly before Wednesday, while
documentation / tutorial / etc fixes can be checked in throughout the
RC process.

I hope this roadmap to ns-3.4 RC1 makes sense to everyone.  If we are
not on the same page, lets get some discussion going on the matter.
-- 
Raj Bhattacharjea
Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Ph.D. Candidate
Systems Analyst
404.894.2955