Re: Google Summer of Code 2013

[Guy Harris <guy () alum mit edu>]

On Feb 15, 2013, at 8:39 AM, Hadriel Kaplan <HKaplan () acmepacket com> wrote:

> On Feb 15, 2013, at 4:37 AM, Bálint Réczey <balint () balintreczey hu> wrote:
>
> > And also pointless, since every modern distribution have apt-get or
> > yum or something similar.
>
> Mac OSX has macports (which BTW is broken for Wireshark for me right now, due to bug 8298).
>
> But you have to remember to go look up whether there's a new version/patch.

I think Bálint was speaking of Linux distributions, not OS X, there.

For Linux and *BSD, the developers/distributors largely have their own package collections, which include Wireshark.

For OS X and Windows, the vendors may have App Stores, to which Wireshark would almost certainly not be admitted, but 
they don't have any equivalent to the package collections provided by Linux distributors and *BSD teams.  For those 
OSes, we act as "independent software vendors", even though we don't charge for the application, and offer the software 
through our own Web site.

There do exist *third-party* package collections for OS X, such as MacPorts - I don't know of any for Windows - but we 
don't use them. I think relying on an OS X package collection would be overkill, as somebody who only wants a packet 
analyzer for OS X shouldn't have to install some Unix-geek-oriented package manager.

> Even for Linux, you could just have wireshark check for a new version and tell the user. (if they enable such 
> auto-checking)

What is the user to do when informed that a new version exists?  There's no guarantee that "apt-get update wireshark" 
or "yum update" or Synaptics Package Manager or... will give you that new version.  At least on some distributions, the 
package management software will check for new versions in its repository and will offer them to the user; would that 
not be sufficient?

(I.e., different OSes do this differently, and perhaps we should handle this differently on different OSes.)

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