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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Can we move to Lua 5.2.3 only?

From: Niels de Vos <ndevos@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 10:06:54 +0200
On Wed, Apr 02, 2014 at 07:03:36PM -0400, Hadriel Kaplan wrote:
> 
> On Apr 2, 2014, at 6:07 PM, Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> >>> In that case I'd vote no: Redhat EL 6 comes with 5.1.4 and it probably has a long lifetime ahead of it.
> >> 
> >> How hard/painful would it be to install Lua 5.2.x? (I don't know the answer - just asking)
> >> It's a tiny little library compared to most of Wireshark's others, fwiw.
> > 
> > Probably not too hard--I know Lua's small.  But most users (who just do "yum install lua") won't get it so we'll be losing Lua for 99% of the RHEL6 users.
> > 
> > Maybe it's not that big a deal but it's worth some thought…
> 
> Sadly, I know nothing about yum and RHEL6 other than as being an occasional user of it. It looks like there are plenty of yum repositories with Lua 5.2.x, but not for RHEL6. How does one go about requesting an upgrade of that - enter a ticket in Redhat as customer? (is that like crazy wishful thinking? I don’t know anything about their policies for such things)

With RHEL being an Enterprise distribution, RHEL6 will likely try to 
stay at lua-5.1 for as long as it can. Likely until RHEL6 goes 
end-of-life. If lua-5.2 is completely backwards compatible (nothing 
deprecated, no behavior changes), a customer can open a support ticket 
and request an update for lua. But, these kind of requests are not 
granted often or easily.

That said, most RHEL users will likely install Wireshark from the 
standard RHEL repositories on Red Hat Network. Even Wireshark as 
a 'leaf' package (nothing depends on it) is expected to be mostly 
backwards compatible (UI, commandline parameters, ...) when a version 
update is done. Wireshark in RHEL-6.5 has been updated to version 1.8 
(RHEL-6.4 came with 1.6, iirc), and I see that as something out of the 
ordinary.

Users that prefer/need a newer version of Wireshark, are probably 
building the binaries or packages themselves. They should not have much 
difficulties with building a lua update too.

> Alternatively, if you’re running RHEL6, can you try this:
> curl -R -O http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.2.3.tar.gz
> # or 'wget http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.2.3.tar.gz' instead
> tar zxf lua-5.2.3.tar.gz
> cd lua-5.2.3
> make linux test
> 
> If that works (and it should in theory), maybe it won’t be too painful to just add that to the install instructions or even write up a simple script to do it?
> 
> (...just trying to think of a solution...)

That surely is one possible solution :)

Thanks,
Niels

-- 
Niels de Vos
Sr. Software Maintenance Engineer
Support Engineering Group
Red Hat Global Support Services