Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Dependencies on shared libraries at build time

["Olivier Biot" <ethereal@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi list,

Now that most if not all problems related to the generation of a
shared-library version of Ethereal and helpers, I'd like to know if we
can tackle another issue, namely avoiding to build Ethereal entirely
if the libethereal API did not change.

If you today add or modify a dissector to Ethereal, and don't do any
other modifications, then you should not run a "make" from the
top-level directory as this will take ages and will relink all
binaries that depend on libethereal. This takes *ages* to complete on
my CygWin and is needless as long as the libethereal API towards the
binaries using it does not change.

The workaround I use today is to perform a "make" in epan and then run
ethereal from the top-level directory.

Has anyone experience with fixing this type of needless dependencies
(at least they are needless when building shared library objects
against which we link the binaries)?

Regards,

Olivier