[Pkg-netsim-devel] Bug#785565: [Ns-developers] State of ns3 in the Debian distribution

[Tom Henderson]

Hi Martin, responses inline below.

On 10/04/2017 05:26 AM, Martin Quinson wrote:
> Hello dear developers,
>
> [I hope that this is the right channel for this. Please be patient if not]
Yes, it is the right list.
>
> I come to you to raise you awareness on the state of NS3 in Debian. It
> suffers of two bugs concerning the graphical interface(s). One of them
> is seen "important", meaning that ns3 will not be part of the next
> Debian release (and it will also be dropped by derivative
> distributions such as Ubuntu).
>
> The problems are described here and here:
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=785565
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=875071
>
> In short, the first bug is about the dependency on pygoocanvas, that
> will soon be removed from Debian. If ns3 keeps depending on it, ns3
> will be completely removed also (it is already removed from the
> "testing" rolling release, and will be completely wipped out if we
> don't take any action).
>
> The second bug is about the same kind of issue with Qt4. But I think
> we have more time to react (as described in the bug report).
>
> So, my question is to know whether you have any plan to replace these
> dependencies with the modern versions of these functionnality (gir in
> the case of pygoocanvas IIRC, and Qt5 in the other case).
The maintainers for these animators are looking into the possibility of 
these replacements (to reply later).
> Also, if you have an easy way to drop these dependencies (by disabling
> them at build time), that could solve the issue on our side.  I know I
> should RTFM for that, but I fail to find the time, and I would
> appreciate this help in the package maintainance, please. The current
> build receipe is here (that's a makefile):
> http://sources.debian.net/src/ns3/3.26%2Bdfsg-1/debian/rules/
There isn't an ns-3 build dependency on netanim.  The pyviz visualizer 
is automatically left out of the configuration if the prerequisites are 
not found by Waf.  Is this sufficient (if we don't resolve these package 
dependencies in time)?

> If you're interested, the build logs are here:
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=ns3&suite=sid
>
> When answering this email, that'd be great if you could keep the bug
> reports in CC so that we can keep track of it from the Debian
> perspective.
>
We are about to make a new ns-3 release (3.27).  We also noticed that 
the netanim package in Debian stretch is very old (3.100+ while we are 
now at 3.108).  Can we work towards replacing the old versions with the 
new versions in the current release of Debian, or must we wait until the 
next Debian release?

- Tom