[Ns-developers] Current Merge Queue for Ns-3.6 Release

[craigdo@ee.washington.edu]

Hi All,

The cutoff date for adding new features to ns-3.6 is today.  Time flies when
you are having fun, eh?

My current list of unresolved candidates for merge is:

Feature Description                           Responsible People?
--------------------------------------------- -------------------------
1. Nix-Vector Routing ....................... George Riley, Josh Pelkey
2. WiMAX Models ............................. Faker Moatamri et al.
3. 802.11 10 MHz Channel .................... Ramon Bauza
4. NetAnim Animator Support ................. George Riley, Josh Pelkey
5. Miscellaneous ............................ Timo Bingmann
6. Patch to Pause and Resume an Interface ... Adrian Tam

We can get one, possibly two, of these features into ns-3 if we start
merging soon.

Since I have only seen activity on two of these candidates, I am going to
assume that everyone else is dropping out and we are left with:

1. Nix-Vector Routing ....................... George Riley, Josh Pelkey
2. NetAnim Animator Support ................. George Riley, Josh Pelkey

As I understand it, the issues remaining are:

---

1. Nix-Vector Routing

A Nix-Vector-specific object pointer was added to Packet to support this
routing package but I believe this has been moved to PacketMetadata.  I
still personally don't like this very much since it is a solution to a
specific problem encoded in a generic class (and actually PacketMetadata is
designed for something slightly different).

I could live with it temporarily if it is felt that Nix vectors are a huge
win in complicated (George's Campus) simulations.  I could live with it
slightly more comfortably if the Ptr<NixVector> was a Ptr<Object> so we
could at least pretend this was a generic thing :-)

I think there needs to be a wider discussion on supporting what seems to
essentially be object aggregation to packet metadata, but I don't think we
need to hold up this feature for that debate.

2. NetAnim Animator Support

There seems to be a philosophy-of-helper issue brewing regarding this.  My
opinion is that it is way too late in the release process for this kind of
discussion to be taking place.  It has been proposed that this feature could
go into src/contrib until the helper questions are answered.  I think this
is okay.

---

It sounds to me like we could get this stuff merged in fairly short order if
we get a few +1 comments and if the features just slide in and work.

Comments?

-- Craig