Re: pcap_compile_nopcap() not in man pages

[Guy Harris via tcpdump-workers <tcpdump-workers () lists tcpdump org>]

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> From: Guy Harris <gharris () sonic net>
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> Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2020 12:59:35 -0700
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> (Your first attempt seems to have worked - finally.  Perhaps Michael cleared the backlog?)
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> On Aug 10, 2020, at 4:24 AM, Denis Ovsienko via tcpdump-workers <tcpdump-workers () lists tcpdump org> wrote:
>
> > It turns out, pcap_compile_nopcap() has been a part of the libpcap API
> > since version 0.5 (June 2000), but it is not even mentioned anywhere in
> > the man pages. The existing pcap_compile.3pcap man page seems to be the
> > best place to add this information, since the two functions are
> > similar. Would it be the right thing to do?
>
> The problem with pcap_compile_nopcap() is that it provides no way to return an error message if it fails, unlike 
> pcap_open_dead() combined with pcap_compile(), where you can use pcap_geterr() before closing the pcap_t.
>
> An additional problem is that NetBSD fixed this by adding an error-buffer pointer argument, but that meant that 
> NetBSD's pcap_compile_nopcap() was unfixably incompatible with the one in other OSes.  They've shifted to the 
> compatible API, at the cost of not being able to get an error string.
>
> So, for now, my inclination is to 1) deprecate pcap_compile_nopcap() (complete with marking it as deprecated, so code 
> that uses it gets a compile-time warning on compilers where the deprecation macro is supported) and 2) not document it.
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