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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] [Wireshark-commits] rev 38304: /trunk/epan/dissectors/ /trun

From: Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2011 11:22:03 -0400
Stephen Fisher wrote:
On Tue, Aug 02, 2011 at 08:42:53AM -0400, Maynard, Chris wrote:

Oops. Thanks. Would it make sense to have these types of dissectors automatically generated at compile time?

Historically this wasn't done because it wasn't sure that asn2wrs was "ready for prime time," i.e., stable enough to be run on thousands of people's machines. I don't know if argument still holds or not. It seems like now might be a reasonable time to experiment with changing it.

Do we already require Python to build Wireshark [even from a source distribution]?

If there was a way to tell if it was changed and only then generate it, I would say yes. If it is re-generated without changes, I suspect the compiler would recompile it every time.

'make' does that for you :-)