Hi,
As the maintainer of the wireshark package in Debian I feel like being
addressed. :-)
On 01/21/2011 11:11 AM, Andrew Hood wrote:
Apologies in advance for the tone, but some actions are inexcusable.
Jaap Keuter wrote:
Hi,
Some history:
libsmi doesn't provide MIBs any more, due to
Debian bug 498476 [7]
The bug belongs to Debian, not libsmi. limsmi provides MIBs. Debian
chooses to not include them.
Yes, they can't include them in main, because they are not considered to be
free according to Debian Free Software Guidelines.
http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html
MIB installation was spun out into an
independent package snmp-mibs-downloader [8]
By this step Debian can "ship" MIBs which are note even redistributable.
This package downloads
the MIBs directly from their source [9], so these are not cleaned up for
libsmi.
snmp-mibs-downloader actually include scripts for converting and potentially
cleaning up MIBs.
If you are aware of any cleanup script which would be useful in
snmp-mibs-downloader, please open a bug against the package at
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/ .
Debian is choosing to use the MIB writers version - not the one in
libsmi's source. They would rather have an unusable package than a
working one.
I can't comment on this, but please open a bug at Debian's BTS if you
find your claim valid.
The better solution would have been for Debian to package the whole of
libsmi as non-free, or for Wireshark to provide a Debian safe version
without SNMP support.
Packaging libsmi as non-free would put the depending packages to contrib instead
of main.
The package in Debian works fine if you don't try to crash it with
broken MIBs. How would a version without SNMP support be better than that?
IANA and IETF provided MIBs have numerous syntax errors. The libsmi
authors have gone to a lot of trouble to correct the MIBs they provide
in their codebase. I can not think of a single manufacturer whose MIBs
will all go into libsmi without some syntactic and semantic corrections.
Please include those cleanup scripts in snmp-mibs-downloader.
Cheers,
Balint
NetSNMP does not have the same level of strictness in its parser, so it
was not a problem until the switch was made to libsmi.
FYI OpenNMS runs into the same problems with faulty MIBs.
Andrew
