[ns] NS tutorial update proposal

[Joachim Fabini]

Hi Pedro,
 
> You are, of course, 100% correct - the tutorial is outdated 
> and its very confusing to first time users.
>  
> One problem is that, in general, NS2 users ask much, but 
> contribute little when they have their questions solved - 
> either by the help of somebody, or by their own.

Your statements match very close my first impression as NS2
newbie. Reading through the mailing list archive helps, but 
I also noticed that - compared to other groups - there are very, 
very few people (won't mention names ;) who regularily answer 
questions - thanks to you and to the other members for their 
help and time. 

As about the reason for the rather low feedback on the mailing
list I can only speculate: on one hand, the plain NS is pretty 
complex, and people new to NS seem to try the "minimum effort 
approach" - instead of searching through the archive they 
immediately send their question to the list. This yields a high 
ratio of "noise" traffic. As soon as users become familiar with
NS they focus on their specific task and many of them no longer 
actively participate in the list. On the other hand 
the high number of patches, releases, and variants (moreover the
incompatibility of some of these patches with each other) make
answering questions on NS more difficult. 
In addition it seems to me that NS is used mainly in the academic 
field, where people usually leave after having completed their 
project (paper, thesis, etc.) - sadly enough sometimes without 
leaving behind any usable documentation of their patches/modules.

So it's up to us (academics, be it students or supervisors) to
make sure that we contribute something back to the community - 
and prepare students for real life by forcing them to document
what they have done and giving this back to the community.

Only as an example, regarding chapter VII of Marc's tutorial - 
in half an hour the person who changed the ping sources and 
included the sources into the NS distribution could also have 
updated the related web pages. If someone else is expected to
do this, it takes him definitely longer to find out what 
exactly was changed and why... I tried to include all details
that I have noticed into my posting but I'm almost sure that I
skipped some.

>  
> Some examples from my personal experience:
> http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-users/2006-June/056015.html
> http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-users/2006-January/053560.html

Yes, it's sad - but I repeat myself: the problem is that those
who have gained a medium level of experience in NS and who have
used the work of all previous NS developers are the target group 
for these contributions - having spent two days on NS does not 
give me the experience to find out all changes (and the reason 
for these changes). 


> Regarding this particular topic, what I suggest is to:
>  -  create a page about NS2 tutorials in the NS2 wiki, which 
> could be used to detail the important changes for recent 
> versions of NS2 of this, and possibly other tutorials. 

Good idea, but I see the tutorial maintenance as an orthogonal 
task to what you have proposed. The tutorial pages have such a 
high rating in search engines (like Google) that users will find 
the initial tutorial first. So imho the only way how to solve 
the problem is to keep synchronized the text and sources of 
these tutorials first - or take them offline, which is also not 
the solution that I'd like to go.

> However, in my opinion, major improvements in problems like 
> this will only be possible if more users take the action to 
> contribute.

I completly agree with your point of view.

Thanks anyhow,
best regards
--Joachim