Sprints

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What is a sprint?

A sprint is a scheduled time for ns-3 contributors to gather and focus their undivided attention on improving the code, documentation, or tests.

Sprints are open to anyone, and are conducted on IRC, and if needed, other virtual meeting technologies.

  • IRC channel is #ns-3 at irc.freenode.net

The Django project has a good reference and links to some presentations all about coding sprints.

A summary of the results of sprints will be shared with other developers on the ns-developers mailing list.

Upcoming sprints

Friday December 12, 14h00-20h00 UTC

(note: participants are welcome to attend a subset of the 6-hour slot, if so desired, and maybe we'll run longer...)

Fix as many of the doxygen warnings as we can. A current count of warnings (by module) can be seen here: http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-commits/2014-November/015994.html. There is a full log generated that can be used to identify what is the error, and then it can be fixed with a text editor. How this is planned to work is that contributors who show up will choose a file or set of files (that they are comfortable with documenting) and will try to clear the errors in that file, producing a patch that can be merged to ns-3-dev.
We may also work on reducing includes in ns-3.
  • Coordination: We will use IRC and Etherpad to coordinate the work (make sure multiple people do not work on the same file).


How to build Doxygen for ns-3 and find the errors

  • Use mercurial to check out the current copy of ns-3 (see the tutorial if you don't know how to do this):
  • You must also have Doxygen installed on your machine.

Once you have an ns-3-dev/ directory, take these steps:

   $ ./waf configure --enable-examples --enable-tests
   $ ./waf build

Then, run the script doc/doxygen.warnings.report.sh from the ns-3-dev directory:

 $ ./doc/doxygen.warnings.report.sh -t -e

(Note: this excludes tests and examples; to include warnings for those files, rerun without the -t and -e options). This will produce lots of summary statistics like:

  Warnings by module/directory:
  Count Directory
  ----- ----------------------------------
  3390 src/lte/model
  1532 src/wimax/model
   575 src/core/model
   570 src/wifi/model
   488 src/mesh/model
   338 src/visualizer/visualizer
   229 src/netanim/model
   213 src/dsr/model
   ...
   ... 

Do not worry if the output scrolls beyond the buffer in your terminal window; the full warnings log is written to doc/doxygen.warnings.log.

Once this is complete, you can use the doxygen.warnings.report.sh script to focus on one module or file. To see just the errors from one module, for example wifi:

 $ ./doc/doxygen.warnings.report.sh -t -e -s -m wifi

The -s option skips the doxygen run, and just reports results from the existing warnings log. Obviously, if you want to see the results of your edits, you would omit the -s option so you could regenerate the warnings log. The -m <module> option only shows results from the ./src/<module> module; after printing the warnings counts by file, it shows the actual errors from each file:

 ...
 Filtered Warnings
 ========================================
 src/wifi/helper/athstats-helper.h:49: warning: Member EnableAthstats(std::string filename, uint32_t nodeid, 
 uint32_t deviceid) (function) of class ns3::AthstatsHelper is not documented.
 ...

This means the method AthstatsHelper::EnableAthstats has no documentation, and it's declared in src/wifi/helper/athstats-helper.h around line 49.

To see just the warnings from a single file (or a set of files matching a regular expression) use the -F <file-name-or-regex> option:

 $ ./doc/doxygen.warnings.report.sh -s -F "block-ack.*"

How to add documentation during the sprint

Once you find the list of files and look at the possible errors to fix, feel free to join the chat and request to take a module or file and fix it, and we will list it on the Etherpad as being taken. While all docs are valuable, we should probably focus on code in the model/ directories, then helpers/, examples/, and finally test/.

To add doxygen documentation, please follow the ns-3 Specifics guidelines.

Don't be surprised if you fix one warning and more appear! If a struct, class or function has no documentation, doxygen reports a single "is not documented" error. Once that object has documentation, then doxygen will examine it in detail and report additional warnings. For example, a function with no documentation will generate one warning. Adding documentation about the function itself will fix that warning, but then generate warnings for each of the function parameters and return value, until those are also documented.

Unfortunately, it's not enough just write documentation; you also have to test it. (Documentation has bugs too!) Just rerun the doxygen.warnings.report.sh script without the -s option:

 $ ./doc/doxygen.warnings.report.sh -m <module> # or -F <file-name-or-regex>

(BTW, without -s the script will always build all the doxygen; the -m and -F options only affect what it displays from the resulting doxygen.warnings.log)

Once the script completes, load up the docs in your browser and check that it looks as you intended/you didn't mistype some doxygen syntax:

 $ firefox doc/html/index.html &

As in all code development: wash, rinse, repeat, or, in this case:

 $ ./doc/doxygen.warnings.report.sh -m <module>
 [edit, edit, edit]
 $ firefox doc/html/index.html &

How to contribute your docs

Once you have fixed a file, you may create a patch such as follows:

 $ hg diff file-you-have-fixed.h > file-you-have-fixed.h.patch

and upload it to bug 938 or email it to one of the maintainers participating in the sprint (you can ask on IRC about it).

General preparation

  • Make sure that you can join the IRC channel in advance
  • Make sure you can checkout the development version of ns-3 (we will use ns-3-dev)
  • Familiarize yourself with how to generate a patch against ns-3-dev. Patches you write can be uploaded to Bugzilla or sent to one of the maintainers.

Once you're there

  • Check in on IRC by letting others know that you've joined and are ready to contribute, and a maintainer will go from there