To be quite honest, I asked the developers myself. In this case they are a group of students who implemented that utility and did not know better. Personally I would much rather have new developments added to the main repository than be implemented as standalone. And as Guy rightfully guessed, the main reason for them doing it this way was to basically provide a different UI for the dissection engine with a little bit different output info. Hope that answers your question as well Joao. Not saying it was correct doing it like this, just that it happened. Sadly, this utility is used by quite a few people and will not get an update anytime soon. The version I know of is maintained behind closed doors and they are currently changing the sourcecode to adapt for the ABI change.
Just to clarify, I do not think that people should be using those libraries. But it is a know issue that they do. And forcing them by breaking mid-release is not a good idea in my point of view. Now breaking between major releases - I am all for that (within reason).
On Jan 20, 2022, at 1:12 PM, Roland Knall <rknall@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> But it was implemented by utilizing heavily a wireshark installation including libwireshark and libwsutil
So why, *other than "because it uses Wireshark libraries intended to provide directly useful services such as reading capture files or dissecting packets and that use libwsutil"*, would some program outside of Wireshark use wsutil?