On Feb 15, 2013, at 3:41 PM, Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I'm not following you - I'm not talking about adding wireshark to MacPorts or yum, etc. (it's already available through them)
>
> MacPorts and yum/apt/etc. aren't the same sort of thing, which is the point I'm making.
Ahh, now I see the distinction you're making.
> I suspect most "non-developer common users" know little if anything about MacPorts, so we provide binary packages ourselves.
Yes exactly - I think we are in vehement agreement on that. :)
> For Linux, if that menu is worth providing at all, that menu item should just ask whatever the particular desktop environment has for doing package updates to check whether the *vendor's package collection* has updates and, if so, allow the user to download it and install it, because that's how the binary package are distributed.
> However, unless having apps, rather than the package manager app, provide an "update" item such as that *for apps that come through the package manager*, is a common occurrence, I wouldn't bother with that *at all*, as users are presumably used to getting $PACKAGE_MANAGER_APP occasionally pop up and say "updates are available; do you want to install them?"
Fair enough - I wouldn't bother at all then for Linux, at least for now.
> For OS X, however, we don't leverage an existing mechanism, such as the App Store or MacPorts, to provide binary packages, so we would provide the update mechanism ourselves.
>
>> And this would be disabled by default.
>
> I would *NOT* disable it by default for OS X or Windows.
The tricky thing with enabling it by default is people might be very upset if the tool they use to passively sniff network traffic suddenly starts sending network traffic of its own without their explicit approval in advance. I don't personally care, but I could see it being a concern. You could instead pop-up a question-box asking them if they do/do-not want it enabled, the first time this new Wireshark version that supports this concept is installed. (ie, if there's no pre-existing preference entry set to yes/no, ask the question and save the answer)
-hadriel
