Dissector stability guarantees

asked 2020-07-09 16:24:01 +0000

Avi
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Hello,

Is there any policy in place regarding the stability of dissector field names and textual representation of data?

answered 2020-07-09 16:27:43 +0000

grahamb

flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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None really, but it's informally "discouraged" as it can break workflows that depend on them, e.g. scripted display filters and post processing of fields.

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I did see it happen on at least one field in the WLAN dissector.

Seems to me like we should start versioning scripts.

Avi ( 2020-07-09 16:47:28 +0000 )edit

Unfortunately they do change, it's not as if they are IANA registered, and I believe the WLAN stuff has seen some extensive changes.

Fields shouldn't change within a stable release, e.g. 3.2.x, but could change on the next major version, e.g. 3.4.x.

In a "mission critical" environment I would hope that all the tools, Wireshark, associated scripts etc. are version controlled, elsewhere any breakage would be adapted to.

grahamb ( 2020-07-09 17:12:47 +0000 )edit

In the WLAN case it is necessary sometimes to upgrade wireshark to support newer specs, which can break older scripts.

Anyway, it seems like having multiple major versions installed might work.

Avi ( 2020-07-09 17:19:11 +0000 )edit

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