Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] Backporting policy for protocols that are under construction
There is currently a change pending backport to the 1.12 branch (long
since committed to master) that is a non-trivial dissector upgrade.
Normally we don't backport this kind of change, to keep the regression
potential to a minimum for stable releases, but this situation is
somewhat unusual. The protocol in question was still being actively
designed and developed when the 1.12 branch was created, so the
dissector currently in the 1.12 branch implements a basically
abandoned version of the spec that never ended up in serious use.
I am ambivalent on this right now. I don't want to cause too much
churn on the stable branch, but I can see the argument for backporting
it regardless. It's also worth noting that while the protocol in
question now is relatively narrowly focused, we will likely run into
the exact same issue soon with HTTP2 which is rather more significant.
What does everyone think? Should we be conservative and forbid this
sort of thing? Permit it, but only after some extra level of
testing/review? Other options?
Thanks,
Evan
(The change in question is https://code.wireshark.org/review/4050 but
I'm kind of looking for a more general resolution given that we're
going to run into this problem again.)
