There's is one good reason for a dissector or what else, to be a plugin.
If it is experimental or still on an early development stage, you can have an
option in the installer.
I agree, we have a lot of plugins stable enough to be part of ethereal itself.
We should depluginize them.
So we come to another discussion I want to start here.
How about grouping dissectors together in sub directories of epan/dissectors?
I don't like to have 700 files in just a single directory.
I'd like to suggest following groups for dissectors:
- Layer 2 Protocols
- Layer 3 Protocols
- Layer 4 Protocols
- ASN.1 based protocols
- text based protocols, e.g. HTTP, SIP, MGCP (depluginized), ...
- dcerpc dissectors
- aim dissectors
...
ronnie sahlberg schrieb:
do we need plugin support? it is a serious question.
the plugin api changes rapidly enough to cause pain and very frequent
recompilations for people maintaining out-of-tree dissectors/plugins
for several for-the-public-uninteresting or weirdo protocols.
i use several of those myself.
so in light of that, that they have to patch and recompile (or i
would assume would be the normal case : resync the plugin to current
ethereal once a year or so) does having plugin suipport actually
matter?
does plugin really reduce the out-of-tree maintenance cost anything at
all compared to maintaining an out-of-tree normal (not plugin)
dissector?
i think not.
ergo support for plugin dissectors are semi-useless.
for several such weirdo out-of-tree protocols i sometimes encounter,
the maintainers have given up even trying to use plugins since there
is no saving in cost of maintenance using plugins. instead once a
year or so the dissector is forward ported to the current version of
ethereal. and that special new version of ethereal is used instead for
a year or so.
so, in my experience, plugin support does not provide any practical
benefit at all for maintainers of out-of-tree protocols which leads to
the quite serious question : what is the benefit of plugin support?
end of rant.
On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:22:15 -0800, Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
ronnie sahlberg wrote:
why not call it 1.0
Because I don't want somebody to complain when I change the way strings
are handled so that we can cope with strings in messages being in
various character sets?
Calling it 1.0 is fine, I guess, as long aa the internal API for
dissectors, etc. can still change without people having any chance to
complain that their old plugins no longer work. (Yes, I know, some
people are *already* hoping to build plugins that work with multiple
releases.)
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