Re: GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian

[Sukhbir Singh <singheinstein () gmail com>]

Hello Fyodor and everyone,

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.

I don't think that Symbian is going to fade out that quickly. After all,
Symbian is used on a lot of smartphones including the Nokia business series
phones (E series). Have a look at [1]. A quick Google search showed that no
work has been done for Nmap on Symbian.

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 am aware of the Zenmap PyGTK requirement. A couple of quick points I will
make in this regard:

1. There is no port of the GTK+ toolkit on the Symbian platform. Qt/ C++ is
now used to program for Symbian, earlier it was Symbian C++ but that is no
longer preferred. So if we stick with GTK+, we have to rule out the Symbian
port.

2. However, if we were to use Qt, we would have two ports (actually three,
continue reading) in the three months time period - for Symbian and Maemo
both.

Another interesting positive side effect (the third port) of this would be
that there would be a proper KDE front end for Nmap. The only one was: KNmap
[2], but that was last updated in 2006 and uses Qt 2.3 (latest is 4.6) Now
if we were to say that Symbian might fade away, KDE surely won't :)

So effectively, I would be writing one code for three platforms to start
with, not to mention the other platforms that are supported by Qt. [3]

Also, if you are looking to port Nmap to different mobile platforms, there
has to be a deviation from the 'one code' base. Like if Nmap is to be ported
to Android, Java would be used, for iPhone, Objective C. But I think in the
case of Qt, the shift would be worth it.

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).

For GNOME users, PyGTK (Zenmap) works well enough, I have no intentions to
change that.

I am ready to maintain the Qt code base even after GSoC if the maintenance
part is a problem. I won't run away after GSoC, working with Nmap would be
pretty awesome for me!

Inputs are appreciated.

References:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_S60_and_Symbian_OS
[2] http://pages.infinit.net/rewind/
[3] http://qt.nokia.com/doc/4.6/supported-platforms.html

CC: Fyodor, nmap-dev, soc

--
Sukhbir Singh
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