Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Tough Situation, Should I Switch Back?

["Bryant Eastham" <beastham@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joerg Mayer wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 01, 2006 at 01:21:18PM -0600, Bryant Eastham wrote:
> > Let me apologize in advance for being such a pain about this. I have

> > asked for a tag, or whatever you want to call it, for the 0.99.1pre1

> > release several times now. I have received no direct response from
any 
> > core developer as to why this is not a good thing. In fact, on that 
> > issue, I have received no response at all.

> I currently see three reasons why this hasn't happened:

> 1) Why can't you tell your engineers to checkout a specific revision
of the trunk (or provide them with a > complete archive by doing a "make
dist")?
> 2) Supporting projects that are "closed source" has low priority. Why
don't you provide the source to all > of the wireshark community?
> 3) Gerald is the one who does the tagging - and he has been
moving/getting settled in a new environment.

Although this issue has now been resolved with Gerald's last plans, I
feel that the answers to these questions are important enough to answer:

#1: I certainly can build my own dist on Windows (in fact, I do, every
night, in order to build my plugins). I could then post it, support
downloads, and in short replicate everything that I find nice about
Wireshark.org. Why? Are you saying that the answer to my question (which
deals with repeatable builds, not building in general) is to have all my
engineers running TIP - or even worse to have my users build it
themselves and then try to support them? I could accept that answer,
even though I may disagree, had it been given. How about posting some
information about the build so that I can replicate it? What branch was
it built from? What revision was it? Remember my original question dealt
precisely with my ability (or lack thereof) of doing exactly what you
suggest. There was no information available that would have allowed me
to replicate 0.99.1pre1.

#2: I don't know that there is anything in my request that is limited to
support "closed source". My plugins happen to be, but I'm sure that this
problem will be (or is) seen by others. Possibly they are able to submit
their source and not worry about it. I can't. At the same time, I think
it would be a huge mistake to let any "anti-closed-source" bias creep
into the ways that Wireshark is released with respect to plugins. The
core developers can make the call, but it seems that the
"internal/proprietary protocol" group is one that (in time) can only
help Wireshark, not hurt it. If I were requesting that some special
feature be added to support something that others would not benefit
from, then I whole-heartedly agree with laughing in my face. If all I
request is a tag, then please don't hold my companies IP policies
against me! (Not that it would help anyone at this point to be able to
decode some internal protocols!) Hopefully you can see from my solving
the tshark bug recently as proof of my desire to help this project in
any way that I am able. I am sorry that I cannot do more at the moment.

#3: Thank you! I completely understand! A simple message a week ago
stating that would have shut me up. The lack of answer, plus the other
messages floating around only led to escalation.

Bryant