What benefits would it have from a practical standpoint to have a shared
library for ethereal?
A lot of work but never any explanation on why we need it and what benefits
it will provide.
On unix there is only one single benefit I can see:
Users that run both ETHEREAL and TETHEREAL simultaneously will save some
memory since tethereal and ethereal
would share the pages from phys memory.
I.e. ONLY when running BOTH tethereal and etehreal at the same time.
Since most users never use tethereal i guess this is moot.
For users runing multiple instances of ethereal simultaneously there
would of course not be any memory savings
since these pages are shared automatically between different instances of
the application anyway.
(and platforms that dont do this are broken anyway)
And for windows it is difficult to build shared libraries anyway.
DLLifying ethereal on the windows platform might also send out the wrong
signal to those that does not understand
or does not want to understand the difference between GPL and LGPL.
I vote that for windows we deliberately do NOT dllify ethereal.
?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lars Roland"
Sent: Saturday, March 06, 2004 10:15 AM
Subject: [Ethereal-dev] Current issues with MSVC build process
andlibethereal
> Hello all,
>
> Compiling source files which are not in the working directory creates
> more problems than expected:
>
> Nmake cannot evaluate dependency rules correctly, because sources and
> object code files are in different directories.
> The preprocessor will look in the working directory for included header
> files at first. So all dissector sources include wrongly config.h from
epan.
>
> There are probably more undiscovered errors.
>
> I suggest to revert the recent changes for the nmake makefiles.
> We should still be able to work on the shared libethereal for *nix
> platforms, Creating a dll on Win32 is even more problematic and should
> be done after moving the dissectors in a seperate folder.
>
> I already tried to build a libethereal.dll.
> Two major issues arose:
> How do we export functions to libethereal.dll? (There are at least two
> functions we have to export: report_open_failure() and
> report_read_failure() )
> What do we do with "timestamp_type"? Do we export this global variable
> to libethereal.dll or do we move it into libethereal.dll and make it
> accessible via functions?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Lars
>
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>
