Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] 1.11.0 release

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Oct 9, 2013, at 6:15 AM, Bálint Réczey <balint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I don't work with the mentioned systems, but I think the preferred way
> of installing programs is through packages and not compiling manually
> from source.

So *if*:

	1) most users can get binary packages for their platforms;

	2) it's not too painful for users unable to conveniently get binaries of recent versions (e.g., users with old versions of some distribution where only old versions of Wireshark are available as packages for those distribution versions, as well as those for whom no binary packages are available at all, if any) to get all the tools necessary to build from a source tarball;

	3) it's not significantly more painful for the packagers (on all platforms) to make packages than it is with autofoo (at least not once they've gone through what effort is required to make Qt 4 or Qt 5 usable by packages, so the HP-UX Porting and Archive Centre folks may have work to do in order to package 1.12 *at all*);

	4) no configure-and-build capabilities are lost (e.g., we check for the same OS version quirks that autofoo checks for);

then CMake would probably be OK as a replacement for autofoo.  (Presumably we will continue to make source tarballs for each release, and presumably there's a convenient equivalent of "make dist" with CMake so that it's not too painful to do so.)