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Re: NS DOCUMENTATION and ANSWERS to questions
On Wed, 24 Feb 1999 10:07:32 +0100, Thierry Ernst wrote:
>John Heidemann wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 24 Feb 1999 02:45:58 GMT, Milind Kopikar wrote:
>> >Hi there.
>> > How do I obtain TCP/IP trafic traces through NS?
>> >Regards,
>> >Milind kopikare
>> >IIT Bombay
>> >
>>
>> Please consult the documentation and example programs.
>
>I do not want "to put oil on the fire" (I am not that aggressiv,
>but I use to complain a lot - sorry), but most of the time
>people are posting some interesting questions (especially
>for those in the mailing list who are beginners in NS)
>like this one, they only get a reply like this "please
>consult the documentation". I guess they already have;
>if they didn't, they should have read it before posting
>on the mailing list; but should they have read it, the
>NS documentation is more or less incomplete and doesn't
>reply the questions. Some methods exist in the code but are
>not documented in the NS doc; some of the methods described
>in the doc do not exist in he code because those have been
>removed, etc.
>...
There are many areas of ns that need improvement: the documentation,
the set of functionality, and the level of detail in answers posted to
the mailing list. We're working on all of these, although it's a
balance that's often not perfect. The documentation often lags
because we'd rather make the code available to highly motivated users
now than wait for documentation; the mailing list often lags because
we'd rather work on the code and documentation to help lots of people
than handle questions one at a time. Such is the world of limited
resources.
To respond to part of your comment more directly, I'm less certain
that all posters here have always checked out the available
documentation. I encourage people to check
- the "Installation Problems and Bug Fixes"
- Marc's tutorial
- "ns Notes and Documentation"
before posting here. (All are linked to off of the main ns web page,
<http://www-mash.cs.berkeley.edu/ns/ns.html>). Doing so will improve
the signal-to-noise ratio and usefulness of this resource for
everyone.
A second suggestion to people asking questions:
Please try and make your questions as specific as possible,
and to provide what information you think we'd need to help you.
The overhead of exchanging multiple rounds of e-mail means that
specific questions get much better (more specific and probably more
helpful) answers than vague ones. If you get a segfault, can you
trace it to a specific function in C++ or line of Tcl code? If you
have code that doesn't work, can you make it available on a web page
somewhere so we can look at it and not try and guess what you did?
For folks new to NS with general questions about how to get started, I
highly recommend Marc Greis' tutorial. We also hold occational
tutorials (three so far), watch the mailing list and the main web page
for details.
-John Heidemann