App Store Technical Requirements
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Goals
The long-term goal is to move ns-3 to separate modules, for build and maintenance reasons. For build reasons, since ns-3 is becoming large, we would like to allow users to enable/disable subsets of the available model library. For maintenance reasons, it is important that we move to a development model where modules can evolve on different timescales and be maintained by different organizations.
An analogy is the GNOME desktop, which is composed of a number of individual libraries that evolve on their own timescales. A build framework called jhbuild exists for building and managing the dependencies between these disparate projects.
The modular build and integration with bake is described in a separate wiki page and is intended to be enabled for ns-3.27.
Once we have a modular build, and an ability to separately download and install third-party modules, we will need to distinguish the maintenance status or certification of modules. The ns-3 project will maintain a set of core ns-3 modules including those essential for all ns-3 simulations, and will maintain a master build file containing metadata to contributed modules; this will allow users to fetch and build what they need. Eventually, modules will have a maintenance state associated with them describing aspects such as who is the maintainer, whether it is actively maintained, whether it contains documentation or tests, whether it passed an ns-3 project code review, whether it is currently passing the tests, etc. The current status of all known ns-3 modules will be maintained in a database and be browsable on the project web site.
Figure caption: Mock-up of future model status page (models and colors selected are just for example purposes)
The basic idea of the ns-3 app store would be to store on a server a set of user-submitted metadata which describes various source code packages. Typical metadata would include:
- unique name
- version number
- last known good ns-3 version (tested against)
- description
- download url
- untar/unzip command
- configure command
- build command
- system prerequisites (if user needs to apt-get install other libraries)
- list of ns-3 package dependencies (other ns-3 packages which this package depends upon)
This page used to have a list of requirements for a home-grown app store, but lately, we are thinking of adapting the implementation at Cytoscape and tailoring it to ns-3's needs. This is a project idea for the 2017 Google Summer of Code.