Favoring Npcap over WinPcap at runtime?

[Pascal Quantin <pascal.quantin () gmail com>]

Hi list,

when we introduced Npcap support back in 2015/2016, we decided that WinPcap
driver should have higher precedence due to its known stability (and
despite issues with newer Windows versions).  By that time, you could get a
BSoD with Npcap.

Time has elapsed since, and Npcap is now bundled with Nmap. The number of
commits in Npcap repository (https://github.com/nmap/npcap/) have also
decreased, which hopefully means that the product is more mature (the list
of opened issues can be found here:
https://github.com/nmap/nmap/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3ANpcap).

Nmap team filled bug 14134 regarding a library loading issue they spotted.
We are gonna fix it, but it raises the question of which capture driver
(between WinPcap and Npcap) should be attempted to be loaded first.
Note that for now I do not want to change the driver bundled with our
Windows installers (the Npcap license restriction must be solved before
even thinking about it). So this only concerns people having installed both
WinPcap and Npap. Moreover, if we agree on the change, I would suggest to
apply it only in development branch.

Thoughts?

Regards,
Pascal.

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