The question about about weather or not adding dissection of additional information in a dissector is an enhancement or a bug; I think this is kind of a grey area. If a dissector doesn't completely dissect a header, would a patch that completes it be considered fixing it? Does it switch between a fix and enhancement if the reason the field is missing is either a wrong offset, or a missing proto_tree_add_item statement?
How about handling vendor specific decodes? Particularly where the vendor formerly provided a plugin (under an open source license) and kept it up to date as formats and data changed. When Wireshark.org opted to pull a version of it into libwireshark (which is a good idea) negatively impacts the release of updates. Wireshark is not beholden to a vendors release cycle and a vendor isn't beholden to Wiresharks. But when they do not coincide, functionality that would readily be available is now blocked and delayed. Furthermore, with the inclusion of the now incomplete dissector it makes it unmanageable to provide the full vendor functionality as a plugin.
I think there should be some level of flexibility to the inclusion of dissector updates under these circumstances.
As a specific example I am referring to:
Jason
