Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] Question about the 0.99.1pre1 Release

["Bryant Eastham" <beastham@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

First, thank you Gerald for all your work in migrating from Ethereal to
Wireshark. Having dealt with name changes in the past, I feel your pain.

A slight nit about the 0.99.1pre1 release: is there a reason that there
is no subversion tag for that release? I am open to alternate processes,
but the way that I have my build machine set up I grab a tag, I then
build that tag, and finally I build my (internal) plugins against that
version. I have our engineers download that (tagged) release with the
knowledge that my plugins will work correctly. I also have a number of
automated tests that run against the version that I build (that should
be equivalent to the tagged release), and I do that just as an easier
way to get the executables than by running the (windows) installer.

This process breaks if I am forced to use trunk, because the version
that I would build against is not a downloadable release that my
engineers could use, and because of that the plugins that I build may
not work correctly against that (older) release.

I understand that the "pre1" release may have really been just that, a
prerelease, but at this point it is the *only* release of Wireshark that
I can tell people to download. I'm sure that the real 0.99.1 will be
handled differently (or at least I hope... ;-))

Long story short, do people have alternate ideas about how to build
plugins in an automated way? To be honest, it would be wonderful to have
a "plugin SDK" release as a download that included just the headers and
build libraries for a particular version, but I am aware of the
difficulties in doing that as well. I would then not have to build
Wireshark each night - a waste of time but the only way to ensure the
"right thing" short of caching the build results.

If there is no better way (or even if there is), would it be possible to
create a tag for the 0.99.1pre1 release (although I suppose that it
would be releases/wireshark-0.99.1pre1)?

As a side note, is there a reason that "trunk-1.0" is not
"branches/release-1.0". Sorry, yet another nit...

I don't want to seem critical. I really do appreciate the huge effort
required in such a changeover. And I can be very, very tolerant of
growing pains along the way.

Thanks again,
Bryant Eastham
Chief Architect
Panasonic Electric Works Laboratory of America, Inc.
Salt Lake City Lab
4525 South Wasatch Blvd., Suite 100, Salt Lake City, Utah 84124
Phone : 801.993.7124 Email: beastham@xxxxxxxxxxx
Fax: 801.993.7260