Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] plugins version-subdirectory: Why?

[Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>]

Lars Roland wrote:

> Ashok Narayanan schrieb:
>
> > Doesn't that force us to do something like 0.10.55 if we don't update
> > the plugin API for some time?
>
> No, a changed plugin api is one reason to increase the minor version 
> number. There are other reasons, too. Currently the plugin directory 
> changes with each release. Using only the major and the minor version 
> number would let us have the same directory for a longer time.

Let's be honest here: We change the plugin API in *every release*!! So 
what will be the benefit? Replacing version certainty by guesswork isn't 
a good idea IMHO.

Using this new versioning scheme, we *might* have a different API 
version number, but we usually will have the same version as Ethereal 
itself.

Having a slightly different version for Ethereal and plugins would be 
the worst thing we could have. This will be *really* confusing.

> > More useful would be some sort of plugin API versioning that would
> > automatically refuse to load plugins if the API version isn't right.
>
> We already refuse to load plugins which use an unsupported API. 
> However, real API versioning would be something nice to have.

I'm very unsure, that we refuse to load a plugin, if the API slightly 
changed. If some API function uses a different parameter profile, I 
guess this will simply crash Ethereal while loading a plugin using this 
function.

Or am I wrong here?


Summarize: Unless we have a reliable method of detecting a plugin API 
version conflict (and I currently don't know a simple way doing this), 
we shouldn't change it the way described for the reasons above. *If* we 
have a method of detecting it, there would be no need for versioning the 
plugin API at all.

Regards, ULFL