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

From: João Valverde <j@xxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2022 10:16:03 +0000


On 21/01/22 09:44, Bálint Réczey wrote:
Hi João,

João Valverde <j@xxxxxx> ezt írta (időpont: 2022. jan. 21., P, 1:14):


On 20/01/22 12:41, Bálint Réczey wrote:
Hi All,

João shared his opinion about the project's commitment to maintain
stable shared library ABI within stable branches:
https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/issues/17822

I believe the current practice is reasonable and beneficial enough for
many parties to warrant the work, but I could be wrong.

I agree the current practice is reasonable and beneficial, and it is
currently documented in README.Developer[1], chapter 7.3, to the best of
my understanding and ability.
OK, great to hear that from you. I got the impression from the gitlab
comments that you had a different view.

Do you have changes you'd like to propose? I'll gladly go over those.
I'm happy with the the project's commitment to ABI stability and agree
with Gerald's proposal of trying to revive the abi-complicance-checker
test to help him in the final release checks. I may find time to
restore the changes after this discussion is settled.

Since you are asking, I'd very much welcome less hostility from your
side than what I observed in [2] when I reported the ABI breakage.

What triggered my email was that after I reported the ABI breakage you
made in the stable branch you refused to own and fix it [3] and even
after Gerald kindly stepped in with the fix [4] you kept arguing ([5]
[6] ...) and this made me tired and wondering if you really represent
the project's opinion as you seemed to believe.

I don't mind the email. We do disagree on many things and what I said on the Gitlab issue is exactly what I meant. My lack of patience with you is entirely justified.


What I won't do, however, is maintain your package for you.
I maintain the package in Debian for the users and not particularly
for myself since I'm not using Wireshark in my profession as I used to
do.
In general I'm happy to accept help, but I think I've never asked for
your help specifically for that package and I note that I should not
ask in  the future either.

The Debian packaging in the upstream repository, i.e. [7] serves a
different set of users, those who want to be closer to the latest
development of Wireshark and the packaging scripts are kept a bit
simpler. I intentionally don't make too many changes there to let the
Wireshark project members set the direction and the changes there go
through the regular local review process. I believe the packaging in
itself is useful and the .symbols files help noticing ABI changes.


I strongly believe the upstream Debian package to be a detriment to the project, and not in the interest of users either. I will share my experience as a user. I  had to build the Wireshark Debian package to fix something or other. I looked up online the incantation to use and it seemed to work ok. After it was done building it spewed a bunch of files all over my filesystem. Many different packages. I tried installing them one by one and didn't succeed. I tried all at once and didn't succeed either. I had to guess the order necessary to get it to install. Afterward there was some apt conflict with the Wireshark package in the official repos. I tried uninstalling the packages I had manually installed and broke the package manager with some dependency issue. After half an hour trying to fix it I gave up. The end.

There is no good reason for this package to exist upstream in its current state, nor does Debian recommend that practice in general, AFAIK.