On 11/08/09 04:00, Brian Utterback wrote:
Darren Reed wrote:
Another question in my mind is why shouldn't we kickstart a snoop
project on sourceforge? If it fails to attract a lot of attention, so
be it, but isn't it worthwhile as an experiment? If it doesn't go
anywhere, then that's a decision that the community at large has
made, rather than one that Sun makes.
If Sun wants to stop developing snoop and similarly envisage ceasing
support of it, why shouldn't Sun enable folks to continue hacking on
it ?
Why don't they now? Because Sun owns it.
Darren
An interesting idea, but I am not sure that snoop is a good place to
start. Has anyone ever expressed an interest in hacking snoop? Does it
have any attribute that makes it a better starting point for hacking
than wireshark?
Back in the 20th century, when SunOS4 still existed, people wanted snoop
there..
But the point isn't necessarily to "hack on it", but rather for those
that want to continue using it in whichever scripts they've built around
it to be able to continue doing that and to be able to update it as is
necessary.
How many times have you seen people on the 'web clamour about "why
didn't they open source it if they're going to discontinue it?"?
On the hacking side of things, I know there have been times I've wanted
to do more interesting things in snoop, like decode the ASN.1 in
Kerberos UDP packets.
Remember that the whole reason that we must keep it in the distro is
that so much it built on it in scripts, tests, etc. That means that if
we did pass it to sourceforge or something like that, the one proviso
is that it would have to remain backwards compatible forever (or at
least until we did drop it). This would make it even less attractive
for hacking.
snoop functions and behaves in a manner that is unique to snoop. I think
the value of snoop is in it being snoop, not in changing it to be like
something else. Thus I'm not terribly afraid of it becoming incompatible
with itself.
Just because something is an open source project on sourceforge does not
mean that backward compatibility ceases to become an issue. For example,
if we assume that such a thing on sourceforge did happen, at least an
initial pull of that source code would be used to construct the package
for Open/Solaris. If that sourceforge project wanted its code updates to
be continued to be used in Open/Solaris then it seems natural to me for
it to keep being useful by maintaining backward compatibility.
And not to mention snoop is pretty hairy internally. Again not the
best place to start hacking.
I'm sure there are pieces of code in much worse condition, today, that
still get hacked on. I mean Linux is still alive and kicking, isn't it?
Darren
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