text format stability

[Eddie Kohler <kohler () CS UCLA EDU>]

Hi all,

I've noticed, painfully, that recent minor releases of tcpdump have 
changed the longstanding format for "tcpdump -v" text output.  This 
isn't an inherently bad idea, but there are a lot of scripts in the 
world that parse tcpdump text output, and that are broken by arbitrary 
format changes.  (For example, I have regression tests that check for 
particular packet characteristics; comparing to tcpdump text output can 
be better than pcap files for this purpose.)

I hope that the tcpdump-workers plan to re-stabilize the tcpdump text 
format soon, and that the next release will change a major version 
number, to make the format changes more obvious to users.

Thanks very much,
Eddie Kohler

P.S. There's a bug in the ip_finddst function that causes most IP 
packets with options to report incorrect TCP/UDP checksums.  A bug 
report and patch have been submitted to sourceforge.

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