[Patch] Update libpcap to 1.5.3; Also discussion on whether we should really bundle 3rd party libraries or not

[Jay Bosamiya <jaybosamiya () gmail com>]

Hi all!

I wrote a patch in March that updates libpcap but it turned out to be 
too large and so couldn't be reviewed and thus couldn't be committed.
Most of its size came from the updates in libpcap itself and I 
personally had nothing to do in it.

In order to make it quite easy to review and for simplicity sake, I 
wrote the patch as a small script that is bundled with the actual 
changes I made. (script.sh and nmap_modifications.patch respectively).
I have attached the same as a compressed tar.gz.

To use the script, please extract the file to an empty directory and run 
script.sh using bash. The script allows you to check out nmap, download 
libpcap 1.5.3, runs the necessary changes (see nmap_modifications.patch) 
and then generates a final patch file which can then be used on the 
latest svn repo to update libpcap.

Note: You can test the downloaded libpcap file's signature here: 
http://www.tcpdump.org/#latest-release to make sure that the download 
was successful.

In order to review the patch, only reading the two files is needed and 
testing can be done after running script.sh.

FYI, any tests that I ran after updating libpcap worked just fine. I was 
testing on Ubuntu 14.04 (64 bit).



BTW, Looking at all the trouble that it takes to update a third party 
library, both Gisle and Daniel have pointed out that we should actually 
be having no need to bundle libpcap or any other 3rd party library for 
that matter with Nmap.
Quoting Dan, "The basic question is, should we bundle readily-available 
third-party libraries with Nmap? Sometimes we need to make 
modifications; sometimes (like liblinear) the libraries are not readily 
available; but we don't want to get into this problem of needing to keep 
them updated all the time!"

What I suggest is that we should probably discuss this here and decide 
whether we want to continue with these party libraries (and commit in 
this update) or whether we should get rid of them (thus, not only 
reducing bloat but also removing this trouble of updating).

I personally say that we should remove these libraries, even though I 
just helped in updating one.

Hopefully we'll come to some sort of resolution on this soon. :)

Cheers,
Jay

Attachment: script_to_upgrade_libpcap.tar.gz
Description:

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