Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] CMake support out of source plugin compilation

[Graham Bloice <graham.bloice@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 13 November 2014 13:21, Maarten Bezemer <maarten.bezemer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello,

This email is (a bit) long, as I am trying to explain the Wireshark patches I
send, as requested by Graham Bloice.

Thanks for this, I was trying to understand what was going on from all the fragments.

First of all: I am new to Wireshark and its development. Furthermore I am also
new to cmake development/scripting. So I'll explain my context/background in
this to make clear why I started this 'quest':
I am working on writing an ASN.1 dissector for a custom protocol we are trying
to implement. Soon I decided it is inconvenient to need to full Wireshark
source for the development of a simple dissector plugin. Hence I decided to go
for 'out of source' plugin development, which seemed possible according to
some examples.

I think this is the key bit I was missing, that you want to make plugins out-of-source.

While I understand the concept, I'm not sure about the practicality or usefulness of this.  Won't you still need all the (lib)wireshark headers to compile the plugin, thus still requiring source?  If this is true, what practical advantage is there in building a plugin out-of-source, when CMake already supports out-of-source builds (for the full package)?

While I'm all for making life easier for devs, if no-one else has identified this as a need, i.e. only you find it worthwhile, then we will end up with stuff not generally used in the repo and then who will be maintaining these bits of CMake?

I'm not intending to be negative, just want to understand where things are at and maybe expose them a bit more to others on the list.

--

Graham Bloice