Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] [ANNOUNCE] WinPcap 3.1 has been released

[Loris Degioanni <loris.degioanni@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ulf Lamping wrote:

> Gianluca Varenni wrote:
>
>
> BTW: May I suggest a slightly faster release cycle (you're not competing 
> with debian don't you?) ;-)
>
> I know that there were some substantial changes in the WinPcap team so I 
> really understand the cause.

This was one of the causes.
However, my experience after more than 6 years as WinPcap developer is 
that the release cycle is physiologically slow. I would say that it's 
more "cathedral" rather than "bazaar".
There are two main reasons for this:

- WinPcap contains drivers, and drivers with bugs blue-screen the 
machine, so we normally have a long and tough testing phase. What 
happens is that, after throwing new functionalities, we have a 
alpha-beta period that can last months or years, during which we give 
our users the opportunity to test WinPcap and report the problems.
- WinPcap in often installed together with other programs (you started 
to do that with the last release of Ethereal). This means that that a 
program embedding a buggy version of WinPcap is a BSOD risk even if we 
release a new patched version on our website. For this reason, we try 
not to leave any "open issue" when we make a new release.


Loris