Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Wireshark PIDL generated dissectors

From: Matthieu Patou <mat@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 01:29:50 -0700
On 10/03/2013 08:04 PM, ronnie sahlberg wrote:
What do you propose?
There is very little overlap between samba needs and wireshark needs for PIDL.
It is probably better to continue running two separate forks of PIDL,
one for samba and one for wireshark.

Switching to samba PIDL seems to be a lot of work for miniscule gain.
And who will do the work?
I don't know what is the samba PIDL and the wireshark PIDL.

For me there is only one pidl and it's in the samba repository. Then we have a 2 big use case:

* Samba
* Wireshark

No later than 3 days ago I did huge changes to the code for the Wireshark dissector so that it starts to be able to parse byte-pipe dce-rpc and also parse inline arrays so yes the development on pidl to generate more dissectors continue.

By the way I take the chance of this thread to underline that it's very hard to get the attention of the wireshark developpers to actually push patches (much harder than the Samba actually ...).

I'm not sure that your patch will apply cleanly on the current version on the NDR.pm for wireshark, I'll port it if needed in the Samba tree.

By the way it would be nice if other dev in wireshark understand the term "autogenerated" because I spotted on the packet-dcerpc-frsrpc.c not less than 5 manual changes since the last time ronnie pushed the last version of the regenerated file:


commit c58d4ce28e00994ee54418c00ffddc3d1d701b21
Author: pascal <pascal@f5534014-38df-0310-8fa8-9805f1628bb7>
Date:   Sat Mar 2 22:54:39 2013 +0000

From Ed Beroset via https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=8416 :
    Remove C++ incompatibilities from most of the dcerpc code
git-svn-id: http://anonsvn.wireshark.org/wireshark/trunk@48023 f5534014-38df-0310-8fa8-9805f1628bb7

commit 1e7435e4be8b92828974ff779dfff1bace76db2e
Author: morriss <morriss@f5534014-38df-0310-8fa8-9805f1628bb7>
Date:   Thu Sep 20 02:03:38 2012 +0000

We always HAVE_CONFIG_H so don't bother checking whether we have it or not. git-svn-id: http://anonsvn.wireshark.org/wireshark/trunk@45017 f5534014-38df-0310-8fa8-9805f1628bb7

commit 85cfa7da0e396f6322b7ca5835354744d1f002be
Author: morriss <morriss@f5534014-38df-0310-8fa8-9805f1628bb7>
Date:   Wed Aug 8 03:28:02 2012 +0000

    Add SVN Id.
git-svn-id: http://anonsvn.wireshark.org/wireshark/trunk@44323 f5534014-38df-0310-8fa8-9805f1628bb7

commit dc45bf2a9b3a9c8cfcd55ba3c639ea8a1d4c698f
Author: cmaynard <cmaynard@f5534014-38df-0310-8fa8-9805f1628bb7>
Date:   Sun Apr 29 23:39:55 2012 +0000

    Fix a clang warning due to 'type' not being initialized.
git-svn-id: http://anonsvn.wireshark.org/wireshark/trunk@42341 f5534014-38df-0310-8fa8-9805f1628bb7

commit 15681f4c667c0778ff50eedb2eda9f97e5cbf270
Author: etxrab <etxrab@f5534014-38df-0310-8fa8-9805f1628bb7>
Date:   Mon Sep 12 14:30:41 2011 +0000

    Leading white space in the field descriptive name is not allowed.
git-svn-id: http://anonsvn.wireshark.org/wireshark/trunk@38976 f5534014-38df-0310-8fa8-9805f1628bb7


At this stupid game, manual changes are pretty sure to lose, and if someone is not paying attention next regeneration will override the manual changes.

For thoses I already took care of them here:
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.network.samba.cvs/78414 (changeset 167e2f2b5543008e02613dcd56e36f7326912cdb)

Last but not least I will grab the opportunity of having some wireshark devs listening to complain about the lack of feedback when publishing patches in wireshark's bugzilla. I tried several time in the past to get my patches for dce-rpc dissectors pushed and got no response my only way to get my patches was to get ronnie pushing them.
It would be nice if it wouldn't have to be that way because :
1) sometime ronnie also ignore my requests (I sent update last week but no feedback) 2) It's quite annoying to have fixes that we know are good and will result in a much better dissection but nobody can take advantage of them because they are not integrated in wireshark's source tree.

Matthieu.

On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Andrew Bartlett <abartlet@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 2013-10-03 at 19:44 -0700, ronnie sahlberg wrote:
Cool.
And we contact you when samba-PIDL no longer can generate compileable
wireshark dissectors?
Contacting the Samba Team would seem to be the correct approach.

Given Matthieu was working on generated dissectors only last week, it
does not seem totally unreasonable.

What do you propose?

Andrew Bartlett

--
Andrew Bartlett
http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT                   http://catalyst.net.nz




--
Matthieu Patou
Samba Team
http://samba.org