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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Handling of generated dissectors

From: Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2013 16:27:50 -0400
On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Joerg Mayer <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Matthieu raised an issue that I've seen with asn2wrs generated dissectors
> too, just not to the extent of the pidl dissectors. To make it much harder
> to miss that the changes we are doing are to generated dissectors I see
> two approaches:
> - Name the files differently, e.g. prefix with gpacket- instead of packet-,
>   so we know when we check that file in that there should be an accompanying
>   basefile or generator patch.
> - Have a checkin script check for the term generated in the first few lines
>   and annotate the commit message that a generated file was changed.
>
> Thoughts?

Ideally we wouldn't keep generated files in svn/git at all. We would
keep the sources and (if necessary) the generating tool, and we would
make generating them part of the build process. This slows down the
initial build somewhat, but it makes it absolutely impossible for them
to get out of sync.