Re: project length assessment

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

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Robin POSS wrote:

> I unexpectedly have to fiddle with some ns code, 
> (aodv.{cc,h,...} in fact so far), and so I have 3 questions:
> 
> *How long do you think it should take for a guy with 2 months worth of C
> experience, on a PC running linux redHat 5.1 and with emacs as his unique
> development tool, to understand aodv.cc and crop it wisely so that it do
> nothing but a simple hello message based neighbor disovery,assuming that
> he works full-time on it?

That depends on how much your changes touch on other parts of ns, and
how well you understand the bits of ns you need to.


> *Could you advise me a free C++ development environment, for linux, and
> tell me where I could download it?

gcc (with g++) should already be installed, and you should have used
it to compile ns... 

 
> *How could I tell to my computer:"Rebuild ns but do it quickly I just
> changed one line in aodv.cc since last time."?

make does that anyway, since it's just a question of regenerating one
piece of object code and doing the final linking, based on checking
file timestamps for changes.

(Obgrumble: change a #define constant in a header file and I end up
 having to rebuild all of ns to make sure it gets changed properly;
 something of a disadvantage to #define constants. I think a lot of
 them would be better as bound variables instead.)

L.

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