Hi,
I think we did a very good job in maintaining backward compatibility
in 1.6.x and 1.8.x releases [1].
In >1.6.1 there were no backward incompatible change in the 1.6.x
branch and on 1.8.x branch there were only one [2].
It is caused by a fix [3] for bug 7348 [4].
IMHO while fixing the bug was clearly useful we could consider
reverting the fix on 1.8.x it to return to the original ABI in 1.8.5.
What do you, developers think? What policy should we follow in case of
accidental ABI breakages?
Cheers,
Balint
[1] http://upstream-tracker.org/versions/wireshark.html
[2] http://upstream-tracker.org/compat_reports/wireshark/1.8.2_to_1.8.3/abi_compat_report.html
[3] http://code.wireshark.org/git/?p=wireshark;a=commit;h=e5e09f70168e7534a91959255e558c8a5cd9991a
[4] https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=7348