Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] plugins to builtins

From: Andreas <AndreasSander1@xxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 07:20:18 +0200
Am 21.06.2011 00:27, schrieb Roland Knall:

The reason against plugins might be, and I am just guessing here, that
everyone is talking about the same dissector if it is built-in. But
the plugin could be from a prior installation, or a different
wireshark version.


I tried to figure out for some time, why my
dissector would not register underneath the SercosIII dissector, only
to find an old version of that specific plugin lying in my
~/.wireshark/plugins directory. That might be not the best reason in
the world, but for me it was a nasty mix-up, which cost me quite some
time.

Well, the ~/.wireshark/ directory tree is under your personal control. I wouldn't blame neither Wireshark nor any plugin concept for any outdated files in this tree. Probably one could add a version number for the plugins directory like you find it in the Wireshark program directory tree. But honestly, installing a new version of Wireshark may require to cleanup hacks like dissectors in ~/.wireshark/plugins.

Moving some dissectors to be built-in probably make sense, as the ABI wasn't as stable as required to guarantee compatibility with bugfix versions (even in stable branches).

--
Andy