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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Wireshark PIDL generated dissectors

From: Andrew Bartlett <abartlet@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2013 15:13:26 +1300
On Tue, 2013-10-01 at 10:55 -0400, mmann78@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> The check_col function in the Wireshark source has been deprecated for awhile, but never officially removed.  I've been modifying the source (removing calls) so that it can be officially removed.  The last big hurdle was the DCE/RPC generated dissector files.  I've had a difficult time trying to regenerate the dissectors with the necessary modified source, so I just manually updated dissectors to mimic what the source should generate.
> Attached is a patch that contains the modifications to "PIDL source"
> that generates the dissector files (and not the dissector files
> themselves).  I couldn't tell from the Wireshark wiki [1] if this was
> maintained by samba or Wireshark, so now both will now have a copy,
> with the source already committed to Wireshark repository [3].
> 
> Patch is also available in Wireshark bugzilla [3].
> 
> Michael Mann
> 
> [1] http://wiki.wireshark.org/Pidl
> [2] http://anonsvn.wireshark.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=52313
> [3] https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=8804

PIDL is maintained by the Samba team, the canonical repository is in our
master branch of git://git.samba.org/samba.git

>From the Samba perspective:

I would warn that patching the generated code only passes the pain of
fixing this properly down to the next person who needs to work here. 

As improvements are made to the IDL files or the parser, the generated
files need to be re-generated, and then someone has the un-enviable
choice of throwing away manual changes, or reverse engineering these
back into the compiler.  

Even if you think you have modified them correctly to match your PIDL
changes, please persevere to get the files re-generated using PIDL.
Only then will we really know the generator generates the code
correctly, and only then will the solution be long-term maintainable.  

Thanks,

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett
http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT                   http://catalyst.net.nz