Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Windows only builds plugins if ENABLE_LIBETHEREALdefined
Hello Neil,
Perhaps I can help you to understand, what happened to the old plugin API
,why it is gone now and why things were changed that way.
First of all, all changes were done to simplify maintenance of the plugin
api. Instead of having to maintain a list of complete function declarations
and some other files around this list, we now have to maintain just a list
of function and variable names (epan/libethereal.def).
Unfortunately as a consequence of this improvement (*and* the fact that
shared libraries have to be "selfcontained" on MS Windows) the plugins have
to load libethereal.dll. Thus you'll have to build libethereal.dll, if the
old plugin api isn't available any longer. As long as we had both the old
and the new plugin api in the source tree, you could choose between both.
Unfortunately maintenance of the old api became really annoying and we
decided to get rid of it. Having an unmaintained API in the source tree,
which won't work anyway makes no sense, so those files were removed
permanently and all makefiles have been changed to reflect these changes.
Indeed you are right, there should be a note in config.nmake that you have
to activate ENABLE_LIBETHEREAL, if you want to build plugins, too.
Anyhow the option ENABLE_LIBETHEREAL shouldn't be removed as there are
people building ethereal without plugins and those might want to have this
choice.
Besides these changes, some functions of the plugins themselves have changed
(other reasons), too. If you want to use your plugin with Ethereal 0.10.11
you have to update your plugin as described in README.plugins anyway.
I hope this will be of help to you.
Best regards,
Lars
> --- Ursprüngliche Nachricht ---
> Von: Neil Piercy <Neil.Piercy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> An: Ethereal development <ethereal-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Betreff: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Windows only builds
> plugins if ENABLE_LIBETHEREALdefined
> Datum: Fri, 27 May 2005 12:25:26 +0100
>
> Hi Anders,
>
> I'm not a Windows DLL expert (yet), and I understand the deliberate change
> to the plugins API, but I'm trying to understand whether it is fundamental
> that plugins can no longer be built unless LIBETHEREAL is used, or whether
> it is simply a bug in the makefiles which was introduced as a consequence.
> I'm not conversant enough with Windows library linking to understand the
> implications.
>
> If the former, I would suggest dropping totally the option to not use
> LIBETHEREAL. If the latter, I'd like to know how!
>
> Ciao,
> Neil
>
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