On Saturday 05 March 2005 14:33, ronnie sahlberg wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Mar 2005 14:15:45 +0100 (CET), Jaap Keuter
>
> <jaap.keuter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Sat, 5 Mar 2005, ronnie sahlberg wrote:
> > > do we need plugin support? it is a serious question.
> >
> > Serious answer: Yes
Agreed.
> [...]
> In my experience, many maintainers of out-of-tree protocols seem to
> prefer to just make a special build about once a year or so with the
> out-of-tree dissector built in as a normal dissector, then the full
> version of ethereal with this special dissector built in is
> distributed to the lab.
I am maintaining three dissectors for proprietary protocols used by my
company, and some of them are still under development. That's why I
chose to use plugins. We often need new (or special) versions to
analyze various problems.
> [...]
> Are the out-of-tree maintainers using the plugin api?
> The ones i use are not using the plugin api.
I don't care what happens to the plugins that are part of the ethereal
distribution; if you think they should be normal dissectors, go ahead.
But a plugin api (new or old) should still be present, since it makes
my job of recompiling and distributing dissectors much easier.
I agree that building (and rebuilding) ethereal for linux/unix on
up-to-date machines using distcc takes less than a minute. But I have
to compile my code for windows machines too, so I am using VMware.
Rebuild times (especially make packaging) for Windows are much higher
than for linux (Does anyone know if compiling ethereal for windows can
be distributed?).
So if one of my co-workers needs a new feature or finds a bug, I can
give him a new plugin much faster using the plugin api. By the way,
distributing a single plugin to all our testing machines takes only
seconds, re-installing the whole ethereal package takes much longer.
Sincerely yours,
Thomas Böhne
--
Jäger Computergesteuerte Messtechnik GmbH
Thomas Böhne
Rheinstraße 2-4
64653 Lorsch
Germany
Phone: +49-6251-9632-0
