Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [ethereal-dev] packet-snmp.c and libsmi

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <schoenw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> Guy Harris writes:

Guy> I'd prefer to avoid getting a lot of mail to "ethereal-users" and
Guy> "ethereal-dev" saying either

Guy> 	1) "I tried compiling on Red Hat 7.3 but I got these errors"
Guy> due to an incompatible API change, so, if an incompatible change
Guy> *has* to occur (which I hope is rare), I'd prefer not to find out
Guy> about them via mail messages of that sort (i.e., hopefully we'll
Guy> get warned of it in advance);

I think it is the job of a proper configure script to figure out
whether the libsmi version found is suitable or not.

Guy> 	2) "I installed the RPM on my Red Hat 7.3 system and it fails
Guy> with messages about 'smiGetALife()' being an undefined symbol"
Guy> due to an incompatible ABI change, so if an incompatible ABI
Guy> change occurs, hopefully the shared library version number will
Guy> change (and, hopefully, suppliers of RPMs/Debian packages/*BSD
Guy> packages/etc. will honor that change, although that's probably
Guy> out of your control).

We incremented the shared library version number when we moved from
0.1.X to 0.2.X. Frank was also pretty clear about the API change in
his announcement:

: For those familiar with recent libsmi development: The API has changed
: significantly to allow much more efficient lookups during runtime.
: This means you have to adjust your applications when you skip from
: libsmi 0.1.x to 0.2.y.

Announcements like this are of course distributed via the libsmi
mailing list.  I think this is all we can do (other than trying to
avoid unnecessary API/ABI changes ;-).

/js