On 27/11/23 16:26, Jeff Morriss wrote:
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).
I was addressing the user-wants-to-build-locally use case with the "make
install" comment.
To address your use-case:
1. Someone whose job is to maintain a custom build for a medium/large
organization does not depend on us to create a package, although it can
help of course. At the end of the day resources are limited and need to
be prioritized for a volunteer project. Like I said, RPM doesn't bother
me, it rarely gets in my way or demands much of my time.
2. If someone on the Wireshark team wants to assume the package
maintainer role that could work if they are responsive and not putting
some distribution's priorities above our own.
3. Forcing every Wireshark developer to maintain the Debian package like
the Debian maintainer thinks it should be maintained is definitely not
fine in my opinion. Nobody so far has been able to offer any sort of
technical explanation for packaging Wireshark's libraries separately,
because there is no such rationale, other than Balint is really into
that stuff.