On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 11:54 AM João Valverde <j...@v6e.pt> wrote:
> > On 22/11/23 15:37, John Thacker wrote: > > On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 9:40 AM João Valverde <j...@v6e.pt> wrote: > >> >> There are a myriad issues I have touched upon. To recap, in my opinion, >> if we want to provide public shared libraries (libwireshark, wiretap, >> wsutil... for what I don't know) we should do a better job of that >> collectively as a project. If we don't want to do that we should kill the >> Debian package inanity. >> >> A third alternative is just to keep the status quo and I'll try to avoid >> this subject entirely because of how much it bothers me to just ignore all >> these technical issues. >> > > My understanding of the Debian packaging scripts (and similar for the RPM > package) use case is that people might be running one of those > distributions and want to upgrade Wireshark on their system using their > distribution's native package manager by taking either a git repository or > a tarball and building a package that they can upgrade their > distribution-provided package to. > > That isn't necessarily to add custom dissectors and provide public shared > libraries, though it could be. Oftentimes it's as simple as "my > distribution is capable of compiling 3.6.x or later, but for stability > reasons it's still shipping 2.6.x (Debian buster/oldstable, RHEL 8 and > clones)," and someone wants to update wireshark without any of their own > changes, just without upgrading their distribution. It's handy to be able > to accommodate that if possible. > > > Thanks for the feedback. Let me try to break down my response to that: > > 1. I think spending resources on distro packaging is unwise in general. > "Make install" works fine and there are great maintainers already doing > that work for Linux distributions. RPM is just low-effort low-intrusion > enough that it doesn't bother me to divert from other tasks to work on it > when I have to. > I used to maintain a custom Wireshark build. The packaging stuff was invaluable for that: it allowed me to compile (and easily package) once and push the resulting RPMs to hundreds of systems. "make install" would not have worked for me as the end (user) systems were not capable of compiling Wireshark. I also, for a while, used our RPM stuff as an upstream example for Fedora/Red Hat to improve their packaging, including (IIRC) bringing in all the freedesktop integration stuff. It was a lot easier to check that stuff into Wireshark and point them to it than try to do all the work in their world/repo (which is unfamiliar to me).
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