Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] 0.99.5 and 0.99.7 incompatibility

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:13:51 -0700

On Apr 17, 2008, at 4:37 PM, MKS {} wrote:

I compiled against the 0.99.5 header files and run with the 0.99.5 version of wireshark,
the protocol column gets updated with the correct info.

However, when I use the same plugin with 0.99.7 version of wireshark, the protocol column shows "UDP" (which is the lower layer protocol. Any idea what is going on?

What's going on is that we don't currently guarantee that the COL_ values will remain unchanged from release to release, and thus we don't guarantee that plugin binaries will work from release to release. We also don't currently guarantee that anything *else* about the binary interface for plugins will remain unchanged from release to release (in fact, there's an excellent chance that it won't remain unchanged between Wireshark 1.0 and the next Wireshark release), so you'll need to recompile your plugin to work with a release other than 0.99.5.

At some point, we hope to have a stable binary interface. However, that binary interface had better then be one we're willing to live with forever, and I suspect we don't consider the current interface one we're willing to live with forever (I certainly don't).