Re: GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 11:51:26PM +0530, Sukhbir Singh wrote:
> there we used Nmap quite extensively so this would
> qualify as one of the reasons why I want to work with it. It would feel
> awesome to be a part of something that I have worked on.

Hi Sukhbir.  I'm glad you've found Nmap useful and are interested in
participating in Nmap GSoC!

> I was going through the ideas page and came across the idea of Nmap/ Zenmap
> on mobile devices. However I found there was no mention of Symbian. Symbian
> is by far one of the most commonly used smartphone platforms and a Nmap/
> Zenmap port on it would be great.
>
> Also, a Qt port of Nmap/ Zenmap would work on both the platforms: Maemo
> (N900) and Symbian S60 phones. This is because Qt is now used to program for
> Symbian and a program written in Qt would run on whichever platform Qt
> supports, so this includes Maemo and Symbian both.

As for Symbian, that might make a great mobile target.  Wikipedia's
Symbian OS article claism that it is "the world's most popular mobile
operating system", shipping on 46.9% of smartphones.  I'm not sure how
true or recent that is, and I'm not sure how much of a future Symbian
has.  I doubt Nokia wants to maintain very many mobile operating
systems, and their flagship N900 runs Maemo (soon to be MeeGo).
Still, it may be very nice to have Nmap on Symbian.  I'm not sure how
much work there has been on that to date.

As for a Qt port of Zenmap, a big issue is that we only want to
maintain one codebase.  Currently we use the same core Zenmap code for
Linux, Windows, and Mac because we only use cross-platform
dependencies (GTK, Python, etc.) and we pull those in on each
platform.  So we're not going to maintain both Qt and GTK versions of
Zenmap.  I suppose we could change Zenmap to use Qt rather than GTK on
all platforms, but that would be a lot of work and risk and so there
would have to be extremely compelling reasons to do so (not just to
make it work better on Symbian).  So it may be best to try and figure
out how you can make GTK and the other Zenmap dependencies work well
on Symbian.

I do encourage you to apply to Nmap GSoC.

Cheers,
-F
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