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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] A description of Wireshark

From: Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 20:49:05 -0500
On 01/12/2015 04:08 PM, Jaap Keuter wrote:
Hi,

It feels bloated to me, as in: see all this I can do, such as, e.g. files (and
stuff). Isn't is supposed to be a terse description to grab the attention or
recognition of the main audience?
Start by stripping away all stuff in parenthesis. I subscribe to mentioning
"UNIX-like and Windows", goes to interop. For the rest keep it simple.

Also dopping the 'network' from 'network protocol analyzer' doesn't feel right
either. They main focus is still, and will certainly be, network packet
analysis. The fact that record based file formats can be read as well, is just a
nice abstraction, not it's strength.

Here's my latest attempt; it's still a bit wordy but I like the idea of advertising just how great Wireshark is. Of course the first bit comes from the website's About page.

+Wireshark is the world's foremost protocol analyzer.
+
+It allows you to examine data from a stored protocol capture file or as it is
+captured from live wired or wireless (WiFi or Bluetooth) networks, USB
+devices, and many other sources.  It supports dozens of protocol capture file
+formats and understands more than a thousand protocols.
+
+Wireshark has many powerful features including a rich display filter language
+and the ability to reassemble multiple protocol packets in order to, for
+example, view a complete TCP stream, save the contents of a file which was
+transferred over HTTP or CIFS, or play back an RTP audio stream.

(Of course one could choose different SuperCoolFeatures to put in that last paragraph. I just wanted to give users an idea of what's out there.)