Wireshark · Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] tiny patch for ethereal-0.10.9

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

You meant "three tiny patches." :-)

Yoshihiro Oyama wrote:
>  * fix: link error of plugins/irda/packet-irda.o 
>      with --enable-static
Checked in.

That fix reveals an ugly problem - the top-level Makefile.am not only 
has to know all the plugins, to put them into the plugin_ldadd list for 
non-static builds, it has to know the names of all the object files for 
those plugins, to put them into the plugin_ldadd list for static builds.
That means that if a new plugin is added, *all* the object names need to 
be listed there - you can't just put, for the "xyzzy" plugin, 
"packet-xyzzy.o", if that plugin has more than one object file.
It also means that if a new object file is added to a plugin, the 
top-level Makefile.am has to be updated.
Is there a better way to do this?  For example, could a static build 
construct a ".a" file (on UN*X; I don't know whether a ".lib" file or a 
".a" file or what would be built on Windows+Cygwin or any other Windows 
build environment that would use autoconf and other UN*Xy tools) in the 
plugin directory, with all the ".o" files added to it, and link have the 
".a" file be in the plugin_ldadd list?  At least that way only the 
plugin's Makefile.am file would have to know what object files are in 
the plugin.