Re: [Ethereal-dev] Prevent generation of register.c

[Jason House <jhouse@xxxxxxxxx>]

Maybe the proper solution would not to have a lockfile, but instead have some
better means of detecting wether register.c needs to be made...  As it is now,
register.c needs to be remade every time a protocol dissector needs to get
recompiled.  I assume that you want a lock file because you are modifying
dissector code, and every time you compile your changes, you have to wait for
register.c?

I'm trying to think of a good way to come up with a proper solution... I think
it boils down to the fact that there can be mutliple proto_register_<protocol
name>() functions in a single packet-<protocol name>.c file...

Here's some quick checks that I did (on a mildly out of date version):

$ grep -c -E "^proto_register" *.c | grep -v ":0" | grep -v ":1" | wc -l
      8

$ grep -c proto_register_protocol *.c | grep -v ":0" | grep -v ":1" | wc -l
     23

$ ls packet-*.c | wc -l
    305

It looks to me like there's 8 protocols that cause trouble by requiring
multiple calls to proto_register (ie. vines)...  But there are other protocols
such as apple talk that call proto_register_protocol up to 7 times

$ grep -c proto_register_protocol packet-atalk.c
7

Can we learn something from apple talk?  How bad would it be to require that
each packet-*.c file contains only one call to proto_register_<protocol
name>() ?  Can this be such a bad trade off for the few rare cases?  If the
requirement went one step further rquiring the proto_register_<protocol name>
to use the same name as packet-<protocol name>.c, then generating register.c
would not need to scan every file (probably a great speed boost there) and
would only need to get regenerated when a completely new file is created.

Again, that's probably what most of the dissectors do already...  it's just
the few exceptions that cause the problem...  When I did development in the
past register.c bothered me a lot... In the past, I've edited the makefile to
stop register.c from being made :)

This would basically make register.c require compilation only when things such
as the makefile itself was modified (ie. to add a new dissector to the list of
dissectors to compile)



Biot Olivier wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> How about a lock file in order to prevent the generation of the register.c
> file? Amending the makefiles should not be too difficult (check for the
> existence of a "lock" file).
>
> Regards,
>
> Olivier
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