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

From: Anders Broman <a.broman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 22:52:39 +0200
Joerg Mayer skrev 2013-10-07 21:47:
<disclaimer>In reading this mail it sounds somewhat harsh. It's not
intended that way but I'm somewhat sleep deprived right now and don't
want to spend the time rephrasing it.</disclaimer>

On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 12:13:03AM -0700, Matthieu Patou wrote:
Which bugnumber(s) are still open?
Not answered.

Sorry this is not an excuse
This is not an excuse, it's an explanation. Previously I cared about the
dissectors and tried to make sure that the pidl generated dissectors were
changed at the source. So it was manually monitored because this happened
time and again.

I mean you can complain that it's hard
to run pidl but if a file is autogenerated with a big fat warning at
the top you don't modify it by hand.
Actually it is quite easy to miss: Opening a file at a specific line
(first match of some RE) or running an automated script on a file.

[...] here it looks more like a bit of lazyness sure doing the right fix
is more complicated but in the long run it's a big win for
everybody.
Of course it is some sort of lazyness. But without that lazyness even more
patches remain unapplied (which is another of your complaints). What we
need is some way to notice that we are patching a generated file or to make
sure we "can't" modify generated files. Your email caused a thread on how
to fix this problem *reliably* on wireshark-dev.

As I said in another thread:

"We might have some work to do to insure that the regenerating the
files for wireshark is as simple as checking out the samba-tree and
running the pidl command. "
So I need to check out a huge code base to just get a small tool? How about
moving pidl into a sub-git that can be ckecked out without needing to check
out the whole of samba?

Also maybe it would be nice that I can modify the page
http://wiki.wireshark.org/Pidl to have a simple guide there too,
this page is way too complicated and ihmo not completely accurate.
As you are one of the people who are quite likely to know best what is
amiss with that page, the solution with the least total time invested
in the correction would probably be that you correct that page.

Ciao
      Jörg
Perhaps the conclusion is that we shouldn't have auto generated dissectors where we don't have the possibility to easily regenerate the dissectors ourself, as we can't do the API changes deemed necessary
without outside help. Which may be non existent ( or unpolite (sorry))
Regards
Anders