[Ns-developers] patch upgrades for releases?

[Nicola Baldo]

Hi Tom,

Tom Henderson wrote:
> I've 
> observed over the years that people tend to stick with one ns-2 version 
> for a while despite new releases; I wonder whether it is because we only 
> do source releases and not easy package upgrades.

My feeling is that people stick with past version mostly because they do 
modify the code to some extent, and then they don't want to upgrade ns 
because of the fear that this will break their code. I am not sure 
whether the proposed automatic upgrade/patch solution will remove this 
fear, or if it will effectively reduce the effort in fixing an upgrade 
which breaks private modification.

In my personal opinion, the ideal approach to address this problem is 
for the user (developer) to integrate the code in the official codebase 
so that new releases don't break it :-) of course, this is not always 
possible/worth the effort.

Nicola