Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Libethereal version

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 01:49:25PM +0200, Tomas Kukosa wrote:
> It allows e.g.  plugin to check if it is runnig with the same version
> as it was compiled with. 

Should that check be done by the plugin, or by the code that loads
plugins?

I.e., should one of the symbols that a plugin must have be a symbol for
a string that's the version of libethereal with which the plugin was
built, and should "plugins_scan_dir()" compare that symbol with the
current version of libethereal and refuse to load the plugin if they're
unequal?

Note that this could produce "false negatives" if the ABI for the
routines exported to plugins hasn't changed, if the version number is
the Ethereal version number, so perhaps there should be a libethereal
version number that's changed only if the ABI changes.  The problem with
that, however, is that somebody has to know that the ABI changed and
that they have to change the libethereal version if that happens....