Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Future of Wireshark's shared library ABI stability

From: João Valverde <j@xxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2022 01:21:49 +0000


On 20/01/22 21:39, Roland Knall wrote:
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.


I still don't understand what ABI change you are talking about, and I'm quite curious.

In this case downstream is complaining about a single function that was removed, that is extremely unlikely that anyone was using anyway.

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).

Am Do., 20. Jan. 2022 um 22:25 Uhr schrieb Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>:
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?

___________________________________________________________________________
Sent via:    Wireshark-dev mailing list <wireshark-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Archives:    https://www.wireshark.org/lists/wireshark-dev
Unsubscribe: https://www.wireshark.org/mailman/options/wireshark-dev
             mailto:wireshark-dev-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe