developers meeting on units library

[Tom Henderson]

There will be a developers meeting on Thursday July 11 at 19:00 UTC
(12:00 Pacific) to discuss the possible addition of a library for
strongly typed units and measurement quantities. This is a follow-on
meeting to a discussion started at our June meeting (minutes here):

https://www.nsnam.org/wiki/MaintainersJune2024#Strongly-typed_units

The purpose of the meeting is to 1) resolve whether we adopt anything
for this release cycle, even if limited in scope to the wifi module, and
2) gather feedback on what we should aim for in the near term and long run.

The relevant issue and MR are here:

https://gitlab.com/nsnam/ns-3-dev/-/issues/1042

https://gitlab.com/nsnam/ns-3-dev/-/merge_requests/1887

This meeting is open to anyone interested; the Zoom meeting information
is below.

- Tom

Topic: ns-3 strongly typed units
Time: Jul 11, 2024 12:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://washington.zoom.us/j/92306652413?pwd=EyNiFoawBWlG8PdGFRfO9BzNZYcSTp.1

Meeting ID: 923 0665 2413
Passcode: 004660

[Tom Henderson]

Some meeting notes from this meeting are posted in the below Google doc:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yJj4AlUEgbmMrILAIBRL2wgwYaH4b5ydR--8I197j1c/edit

[Tom Henderson]

I just posted a MR !2085 regarding the units library. Sebastien also
recently posted MR !2068. Both of these are follow-up items listed in
the below meeting summary.

Please review these, and I will try to schedule another meeting soon to
discuss what we do for ns-3.43 release (due in September).

- Tom

[Tom Henderson]

Peter, Sebastien, and I will be meeting on Monday August 19 at 16:00 UTC
(09:00 Pacific) to try to reach a decision on adopting strongly typed
units/quantities and their weak types.  Anyone else interested is
welcome to join.  I will circulate meeting notes again after the meeting.

The last meeting notes are here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yJj4AlUEgbmMrILAIBRL2wgwYaH4b5ydR--8I197j1c/edit

The relevant issues and MRs are here:

https://gitlab.com/nsnam/ns-3-dev/-/issues/1042

https://gitlab.com/nsnam/ns-3-dev/-/merge_requests/1887

https://gitlab.com/nsnam/ns-3-dev/-/merge_requests/2068

https://gitlab.com/nsnam/ns-3-dev/-/merge_requests/2085

- Tom

Join Zoom Meeting
https://washington.zoom.us/j/95695274851?pwd=haeDlhJbIGo5diIoa3xHokL89PkSyi.1

Meeting ID: 956 9527 4851
Passcode: 535913

[Tom Henderson]

All, the outcome of this discussion (attended by me, Tommaso Pecorella,
Peter Barnes, and Sebastien Deronne), is as follows:

- we agreed to merge MR 2068 on weak types within the wifi module. This
can be merged shortly, once we pick a type naming convention that does
not conflict with future strong types. The intent is to keep this
scoped within the wifi module and examples, for now.

- we agreed to keep working on the MR 2085 (strong units provided by
external library nholthaus/units), to further evaluate whether we are
comfortable with its tradeoffs. The focus will be on replacing some of
the key types for wifi (power, frequency) such as Sebastien already
started in MR 2107, and explore other aspects such as Python support and
extension to units that are not already provided. We would not try to
include this in the ns-3.43 release.

- Tom