Comment 8 for bug 1397091

After emailing with Evan, I believe there are a few things that are not as obvious that need to be looked at prior to this bug being processed.

A big major point to consider is that there are companies that have their own protocol plugins in Wireshark, and they are dependent on the API. It looks like the API changes somewhat rapidly, so from 1.6 to 1.12 there were several major API changes. Changing major versions will break the Wireshark API, and there will be major regressions on some applications (not in Ubuntu) as a result. (It seems the APIs have no reverse compatibility, which is the problem).

With regard to Precise being on the long-unsupported 1.6.x branch, moving from 1.6.x to 1.8.x introduces far less changes to the API, and for those third-party plugins the impact would be less work to get working again, with many needing just a recompile as the API changes were not substantial.

During the email with Evan, the suggestion from them was as follows, and I believe there may be merit in these solutions based on the Wireshark API problem:
(1) Precise should go to a supported Wireshark release, in this case 1.8.x, possibly based off of Debian's stable-sec which is maintained with security updates.
(2) Trusty should go to the latest 1.10.x release upstream, which fixes security issues there.
(3) Utopic is already 1.12.x and it is an unambiguous decision to move it up to the 1.12.1 packaging already in Vivid (which includes 1.12.2 security fixes)

I will investigate getting debdiffs into place for these three solutions. As such, Precise and Trusty debdiffs have been removed from the bug. The Utopic debdiff is still valid.

The PPA linked will be updated to remove the Trusty and Precise builds, until such time I have debdiffs for consideration based on the above solutions (1) and (2).