Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Future of Wireshark's Debian packaging scripts in the main r

From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2023 12:04:58 -0800
On Dec 21, 2023, at 6:51 AM, Bálint Réczey <balint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I'm not sure why libvirt dissector users should be "their users". In my eyes they are very much our users as well since they use Wireshark extended with the plugin and I'm happy that they get the best service.

It appears that the protocol that the libvirt dissector handles is an ONC RPC-based protocol, and that the dissector, for some unknown reason, has its own XDR routines, rather than using the ones that come with Wireshark and are used by the built-in dissectors for various ONC RPC-based protocols.

Is there some compelling reason why we don't just implement a built-in dissector for the libvirt protocol, using our built-in support for ONC RPC-based protocols, and render the libvirt plugin unnecessary?

(Speaking of ONC RPC-based protocols, it might also be nice if somebody either 1) took the libvirt project's genxdrstub.pl Perl script and turned it into a script that converts rpcgen specifications for ONC RPC-based protocols into dissectors using our built-in ONC RPC support or 2) took Sun's rpcgen itself and did the same?  If somebody went with 2), they should probably grab a reasonably recent version of rpcgen, such as one from OpenSolaris - probably the one in Illumos - rather than one from the 1980's-vintage open-source ONC RPC release Sun put out, as the latter doesn't have support for 64-bit integers.)