Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] [PATCH] Make Net-SNMP Optional for VC++ Build

["Olivier Biot" <ethereal@xxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Ronnie Sahlberg

| I say we just kill off UCD|NET-SNMP completely.
| The only thing we use them for is to translate a OID into a name.

I agree.

| No big deal.

Not quite certain as parsing a MIB requires some programming, though.

| If people miss them enough people will write replacement code. If
not, then
| no one cares about it.
|
| If it comes down to it we can hack up something small to do this
translation
| ourself based on a flat database file.
| Say   we add temporarily a small text file with one entry per line :
| oid    name
|
| Not too much code to write to read this file when ethereal starts
and store
| it in some table.

That'd then be a "temporary work-around" which will last for the time
until someone contributes a MIB parser which resolves the OIDs to
names.

Is it 100% out of the question to ask the Net-SNMP developers whether
we're allowed to use portions of the Net-SNMP code which *don't* have
us break the GPL license and their license (and add a reference to
AUTHORS)? Maybe that isn't the easiest alternative for maintaining the
source code trees, but I'd rather not reinvent the wheel as I may also
reinvent the flat tyre as a result :)

| Not as easy as copying in a MIB from somewhere else and make
ethereal aware
| of the new OIDs   but
| 99% of users  probably only care about the same 20-30 mibs anyway.
We
| prepopulate that db file with
| the oids from those mibs and see what happens.

And even if we copy the MIBs, I'm not quite certain that all MIBs can
be redistributed freely. Probably the ones which ship with Net-SNMP
do, but we must be careful here.

Regards,

Olivier