Re: [ns] improving the ns development

[Lloyd Wood <l.wood@eim.surrey.ac.uk>]

ns has a cvs server. It has had a cvs server for years, as you'll see
if you look at the cvs web pages. Write access to that is restricted
to trusted ns developers (come up with enough helpful patches and you
can join the club), although anonymous read access is available, as is
cvsweb.

The main barrier to improving the ns development process is that ns is
also a darpa research project (vint), and discussions concerning ns
development in vint are not public, with the result that people
outside the vint loop know less about where the ns vint people are
active, what's being worked on and planned, etc. There's little
outward communication.

Couple that with a bsdish model (knowledgeable few doing little after
careful thought) rather than linux development model (clueless many
doing lots - ns isn't a kernel, and spotting simulation errors needs
greater clue than whining that the latest kernel wouldn't boot) and
lack of available time to test and commit patches posted to the
list... goodbye, third-party synergy. Most of the remaining synergy
comes from an ever-changing pool of students who are using ns in a
desperate attempt to graduate.

I don't think ns needs any more features. What it needs is for the
existing features to work together in a more coherent fashion.

L.



On Mon, 6 Aug 2001, Neundorf Alexander wrote:

> I'm for some weeks now subscribed to this mailinglist, and I see
> that many people are working or looking for similar things.
> Enhancements to ns are distributed as packages/patches to special
> versions of ns, so it is hard to get them going with other
> versions. Things looking like bugs are found but can be fixed only
> locally. And since they are fixed only locally nobody really knows
> whether it was the right fix. Some things in the code are
> quite.... hmm... tricky.
> 
> I want to suggest a different development model for ns2. Don't
> expect anything fancy now, just the "let's do what everybody
> nowadays does" ;-) So, to make it short, let's put ns2 on a cvs
> server (whereever, if there is no other choice SourceForge). This
> way we would have more people who really know the code, more fixes
> would be committed to the code, more new features, new introduced
> bugs would be found more or less instantly and so on (speaking
> from my experience from kde cvs :-)
> 
> What do you think ?
> Actually who is responsible for this ?
> 
> Let's make ns2 even better than it is now !

<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>