Re: Future of Wireshark's shared library ABI stability

[João Valverde <j () v6e pt>]

On 21/01/22 09:44, Bálint Réczey wrote:
> Hi João,
>
> João Valverde <j () v6e pt> 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.
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