Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Current issues with MSVC build process andlibethereal
On Fri, 2004-03-05 at 17:46, Ronnie Sahlberg wrote:
> What benefits would it have from a practical standpoint to have a shared
> library for ethereal?
> A lot of work but never any explanation on why we need it and what benefits
> it will provide.
>
>
> On unix there is only one single benefit I can see:
> Users that run both ETHEREAL and TETHEREAL simultaneously will save some
> memory since tethereal and ethereal
> would share the pages from phys memory.
> I.e. ONLY when running BOTH tethereal and etehreal at the same time.
> Since most users never use tethereal i guess this is moot.
>
> For users runing multiple instances of ethereal simultaneously there
> would of course not be any memory savings
> since these pages are shared automatically between different instances of
> the application anyway.
> (and platforms that dont do this are broken anyway)
>
> And for windows it is difficult to build shared libraries anyway.
> DLLifying ethereal on the windows platform might also send out the wrong
> signal to those that does not understand
> or does not want to understand the difference between GPL and LGPL.
> I vote that for windows we deliberately do NOT dllify ethereal.
>
> ?
1. It decreases the size of the binary distribution, which is a win for
those people that rely on the binary distributions to install ethereal
and tethereal. It's also good for packaging on small rescue systems
(Knoppix, etc.)
2. It's a step forward in making ethereal a true library, with an
interface for higher level languages (Python, Perl), so that other
programs besides an interactive sniffer can be written that take
advantage of ethereal's protocol dissectors.
--gilbert
