Re: Compilation error

[Lloyd Wood <eep1lw@surrey.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Nader Salehi wrote:

> Thanks for pointing out the problem.  Since the mftp source does not
> seem to be part of our validation test scripts, these errors continued
> to exist.  

Oh, this is So Wrong. Example scripts supplied with ns should never
drop into the tcl debugger. If they do, there's Obviously a Problem
That Needs Fixing.

Setting up a test harness that runs through every example script
supplied with ns once every couple of weeks or so, and alerts
developers to error messages and debugger output (which shouldn't be
happening) would be a very sensible thing to do.

It's not the behavioural catch-all of nightly validation checks, and
it's not intended to be. But it would be a good way of finding and
catching problems early before they impact the userbase; the example
scripts are part of the ns package, they do use code that
validation doesn't catch, and they should be tested.

(I've also noticed that one reaction to clarify something that's not
 clear to an ns user is to add comments in the relevant validation
 test, rather than to an example script or the documentation.)

L.

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