2.3 Waf

Once you have source code downloaded to your local system, you will need to compile that source to produce usable programs. Just as in the case of source code management, there are many tools available to perform this function. Probably the most well known of these tools is make. Along with being the most well known, make is probably the most difficult to use in a very large and highly configurable system. Because of this, many alternatives have been developed. Recently these systems have been developed using the Python language.

The build system Waf is used on the ns-3 project. It is one of the new generation of Python-based build systems. You will not need to understand any Python to build the existing ns-3 system, and will only have to understand a tiny and intuitively obvious subset of Python in order to extend the system in most cases.

For those interested in the gory details of Waf, the main web site can be found at http://freehackers.org/~tnagy/waf.html.

This document was generated on December, 19 2008 using texi2html 1.78.