Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] (1) building Wireshark in build.wireshark fails, (2) how to
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From: Graham Bloice <graham.bloice@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2021 22:01:48 +0100


On Thu, 15 Apr 2021 at 21:23, Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 15, 2021, at 2:03 AM, Graham Bloice <graham.bloice@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Wireshark is a complicated project to build.  You can follow the tested way, as shown in the Developers Guide, which is essentially what our Continuous Integration (CI) systems use and most other developers, or you can forge your own path on less travelled routes strewn with rocks, rusty nails and broken glass that you mostly have to deal with on your own.
>
> Unless you have some inescapable need to do things in a different way, it's easier and more productive to follow the herd.

Building in a subdirectory with a name other than "build" isn't exactly a "[route] strewn with rocks, rusty nails and broken glass".  *That* should Just Work (at least if the name is all ASCII printable characters and contains no spaces); if it doesn't, that's a sign that the build process isn't robust enough.


Beginning with those very dangerous 3 words, in my experience, if folks are doing something "different" in one place, they're also likely to be doing something different in other places.  I've chased down enough build errors reported by others that turned out to be caused by being different in ways that would never succeed that I no longer think it productive of my time to do so.  Others may of course feel different.

Unfortunately, as a project we don't seem to have enough spare bandwidth to support those that wish to furrow their own path.  Until someone steps up to fix the build process to work in all possible configurations on all possible supported platforms, following the "established" pattern seems to get folks to a productive state sooner.
 
Building in the source directory *itself* is a bit more painful, but that doesn't appear to be what we're talking about here; it sounds as if we're talking about

        mkdir build.wireshark
        cd build.wireshark
        cmake ..
        make

--
Graham Bloice