Re: Wireshark ABI compatibilty in release branches

[Evan Huus <eapache () gmail com>]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 1:12 PM, Bálint Réczey <balint () balintreczey hu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I think we did a very good job in maintaining backward compatibility
> in  1.6.x and 1.8.x releases [1].
>
> In  >1.6.1 there were no backward incompatible change in the 1.6.x
> branch and on 1.8.x branch there were only one [2].
> It is caused by a fix [3] for bug 7348 [4].
>
> IMHO while fixing the bug was clearly useful we could consider
> reverting the fix on 1.8.x it to return to the original ABI in 1.8.5.
>
> What do you, developers think? What policy should we follow in case of
> accidental ABI breakages?

In this particular case the bug is so minor that I have no problem
with reverting it (I personally wouldn't have bothered back-porting it
in the first place).

In the general case I think we should try to avoid ABI breakage where
possible, but not at the cost of crashers or security bugs. The very
first google hit for many variants of 'libwireshark' or 'using
libwireshark' is [1] which explains how it's not really usable in
3rd-party programs anyways.

Tangentially, it would be nice if it were usable as a proper library
in 3rd-party programs, but that's a lot of work somebody would have to
do to get it in shape.

Cheers,
Evan

[1] 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10308127/using-libwireshark-to-get-wireshark-functionality-programatically/10355701#10355701

> Cheers,
> Balint
>
> [1] http://upstream-tracker.org/versions/wireshark.html
> [2] http://upstream-tracker.org/compat_reports/wireshark/1.8.2_to_1.8.3/abi_compat_report.html
> [3] http://code.wireshark.org/git/?p=wireshark;a=commit;h=e5e09f70168e7534a91959255e558c8a5cd9991a
> [4] https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=7348
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