Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] snmp decoding ...ubuntu smi issue ?... different then on windows XP ...?

[Balint Reczey <balint.reczey@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

As the maintainer of the wireshark package in Debian I feel like being
addressed. :-)
On 01/21/2011 11:11 AM, Andrew Hood wrote:
> Apologies in advance for the tone, but some actions are inexcusable.
>
> Jaap Keuter wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Some history:
> >
> > libsmi doesn't provide MIBs any more, due to
> > Debian bug 498476 [7]
>
> The bug belongs to Debian, not libsmi. limsmi provides MIBs. Debian
> chooses to not include them.
Yes, they can't include them in main, because they are not considered to be
free according to Debian Free Software Guidelines.
http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html

> > MIB installation was spun out into an
> > independent package snmp-mibs-downloader [8]
By this step Debian can "ship" MIBs which are note even redistributable.

> > This package downloads
> > the MIBs directly from their source [9], so these are not cleaned up for
> > libsmi.
snmp-mibs-downloader actually include scripts for converting and potentially
cleaning up MIBs.
If you are aware of any cleanup script which would be useful in
snmp-mibs-downloader, please open a bug against the package at 
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/ .

> Debian is choosing to use the MIB writers version - not the one in
> libsmi's source. They would rather have an unusable package than a
> working one.
I can't comment on this, but please open a bug at Debian's BTS if you
find your claim valid.

> The better solution would have been for Debian to package the whole of
> libsmi as non-free, or for Wireshark to provide a Debian safe version
> without SNMP support.
Packaging libsmi as non-free would put the depending packages to contrib instead 
of main.
The package in Debian works fine if you don't try to crash it with
broken MIBs. How would a version without SNMP support be better than that?

> IANA and IETF provided MIBs have numerous syntax errors. The libsmi
> authors have gone to a lot of trouble to correct the MIBs they provide
> in their codebase. I can not think of a single manufacturer whose MIBs
> will all go into libsmi without some syntactic and semantic corrections.
Please include those cleanup scripts in snmp-mibs-downloader.

Cheers,
Balint



> NetSNMP does not have the same level of strictness in its parser, so it
> was not a problem until the switch was made to libsmi.
>
> FYI OpenNMS runs into the same problems with faulty MIBs.
>
> Andrew