On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 11:54 AM João Valverde <
j@xxxxxx> wrote:
On 22/11/23 15:37, John Thacker wrote:
On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at
9:40 AM João Valverde <
j@xxxxxx>
wrote:
There are a myriad issues I have touched upon. To recap,
in my opinion, if we want to provide public shared
libraries (libwireshark, wiretap, wsutil... for what I
don't know) we should do a better job of that collectively
as a project. If we don't want to do that we should kill
the Debian package inanity.
A third alternative is just to keep the status quo and
I'll try to avoid this subject entirely because of how
much it bothers me to just ignore all these technical
issues.
My understanding of the Debian
packaging scripts (and similar for the RPM package) use
case is that people might be running one of those
distributions and want to upgrade Wireshark on their
system using their distribution's native package manager
by taking either a git repository or a tarball and
building a package that they can upgrade their
distribution-provided package to.
That isn't necessarily to add custom
dissectors and provide public shared libraries, though it
could be. Oftentimes it's as simple as "my distribution is
capable of compiling 3.6.x or later, but for stability
reasons it's still shipping 2.6.x (Debian
buster/oldstable, RHEL 8 and clones)," and someone wants
to update wireshark without any of their own changes, just
without upgrading their distribution. It's handy to be
able to accommodate that if possible.
Thanks for the feedback. Let me try to break down my response to
that:
1. I think spending resources on distro packaging is unwise in
general. "Make install" works fine and there are great maintainers
already doing that work for Linux distributions. RPM is just
low-effort low-intrusion enough that it doesn't bother me to divert
from other tasks to work on it when I have to.
I used to maintain a custom Wireshark build. The packaging stuff was invaluable for that: it allowed me to compile (and easily package) once and push the resulting RPMs to hundreds of systems. "make install" would not have worked for me as the end (user) systems were not capable of compiling Wireshark.
I also, for a while, used our RPM stuff as an upstream example for Fedora/Red Hat to improve their packaging, including (IIRC) bringing in all the freedesktop integration stuff. It was a lot easier to check that stuff into Wireshark and point them to it than try to do all the work in their world/repo (which is unfamiliar to me).