[Xorp-hackers] bgp development

[Bruce Simpson]

Aleksandar Cvjetic wrote:
> ...
> - How and where to start reading bgp code in order to find out which 
> class(es) and objects in the code I need to reference to and compile 
> with my future code?  This would be very helpful to me because it's 
> difficult to read and understand entire code. I suppose, this is first 
> step after clear formulation of idea:).

Warning: BGP is Big.

My advice would be to get to grips with tools such as KScope, which is 
an extremely good C/C++ code browser for the KDE desktop environment, 
which wraps the popular CScope tool -- one of the few good things to 
come out of SCO before they got a bit nasty towards Linux.

It is intended for dealing with large codebases on a purely C 
metasyntactic basis, i.e. lookups by module reference -- it doesn't know 
anything about classes.

KScope also gives good GraphViz action for call graphs, essential for 
understanding code flow in large projects.

Also consider tossing the code into BOUML, which has a strong C++ 
reverse engineering plugout now which can (mostly) spot and deal with 
templatization.  I leveraged the design of OLSR off OSPF mostly by doing 
this.

Have the XORP kdoc documentation for the BGP module to hand in a web 
browser. You can generate it yourself from within doc/, but it may be 
easier just for you to mirror the web hosted copy. Also read the design 
doc (PDF) for BGP.

Good luck.
BMS