Hi,

currently, openvas-libraries contains a copy of libpcap called libpcap-nessus.  
libpcap is a library for user-level packet capture and is used in openvas 
mainly in openvas-libnasl.  The libpcap copy coming with openvas-libraries is 
intended to be optional, AFAICT from configure.

The libpcap copy has two problems:

 1. It still refers to "nessus".  The library itself is installed as
    libpcap-nessus.* and its headers are installed in
    <prefix>/include/nessus.  This will cause name clashes with nessus.

 2. Newer versions of libcap are available from http://www.tcpdump.org/ which
    may include bug-fixes not present in libpcap-nessus and additional
    features (for instance, the newer libcap seem to have IPv6 support).

I'm not sure how optional libpcap-nessus really is, though.  Even when a 
system libpcap is already installed (I tested this on a debian etch system 
with debian's libpcap0.8-dev installed) libpcap-nessus is built by default.  
It can be disabled with the configure option --disable-nessuspcap, but even 
with that option, the openvas-libraries code is compiled with 
-I$(rootdir)/libpcap-nessus so that it will pick the headerfiles from 
libpcap-nessus.

We will have to fix at least the naming problem.  The easiest way to do that 
would be to simply remove libpcap-nessus.  I don't know enough about libpcap 
and the differences between the libpcap version bundled with 
openvas-libraries to know whether this really is a good idea, though.  What 
do the other developers think?  Does anyone use openvas-libraries (or 
nessus-libraries) without libpcap-nessus?


   Bernhard

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