Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Anyone of the developers going to support Win98 (and alike)
Date Index · Thread Index · Other Months · All Mailing Lists
Date Prev · Date Next · Thread Prev · Thread Next
From: Andreas Fink <andreas@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2006 23:54:48 +0200

Well, I'm very much for dropping GTK-1 support:

Look at the source in gtk/ to see the effort it takes to take all the
differences between gtk1 and gtk2 into account as well as the effort
to maintain both versions. Compare this with the one-time-effort to
set up a working compile time env for gtk2 for fink.


Ehm. this is not a one time effort. We want to have people be able to use Wireshark on any machine, not just a machine having "fink" installed (by the way, even I share the last name and the enthusiasm for MacOS X with that project, I'm not related to it). Like a doubleclickable installer. Building such an installer is one thing but maintaining all the packages to work under any version of MacOS X is a nightmare.
Some of the packages are not just ./configure and make and might break with newer versions of MacOS X. Making sure Wireshark runs on 10.3-ppc, 10.4-ppc, 10.4-intel 10.5-ppc/intel and so on is one thing. But doing the same thing for all the packages GTK2.8 is depending on is insane as most of them are not used.

The builds I have done for MacOS X since ethereal 0.10 where all easy to install for the end user and only had one single dependency to be present which was X11 which comes with MacOS X install CD's as optional install. I would consider it an overkill to have the end user require to install "fink" and then have to download/install about 40 packages to get the chance to compile ethereal. Also note that the "fink" packaging system had pretty much problems to build under the intel architecture. Also we want a universal binary to be produced so it can be moved from one machine (ppc) to another (intel). Those are things which makes using "fink" not really useful for end users.


Or would you be willing to maintain the gtk1 code in the Wireshark
sources to keep them functional? If no one steps up and offers to
maintain the gtk1 code we very likely will remove it in the not too far
future.
Guess I can do it, I need gtk1, gtk2 is way too slow and all my changes
are for gtk1 so I will have a working gtk1 backport anyway. 
I can't guarantee a daily update but a monthly one is doable. Could put
speed changes in a separate branch too.

Didier

Nice of you Didier.

One other option which should be considered is to build a real Aqua interface replacing GTK+ completely under MacOS X. There is a GTK+ implementation for MacOS X Aqua which someone wrote to use it with some applications but as far as I remember it was GTK 1.2 as well.

The big question is really, how many functions of GLIB/GTK are really used in Wireshark? Having a Aqua version would be really nicer (how is it done under Windows? GTK+ is not used there?).





Andreas Fink
Fink Consulting GmbH
---------------------------------------------------------------
Tel: +41-61-6666332 Fax: +41-61-6666331  Mobile: +41-79-2457333
Address: Clarastrasse 3, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
---------------------------------------------------------------
ICQ: 8239353
MSN: afink@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx AIM: smsrelay Skype: andreasfink
Yahoo: finkconsulting SMS: +41792457333