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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Planning the next major release

From: Bálint Réczey <balint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2015 15:39:27 +0200
Hi,

2015-06-04 23:58 GMT+02:00 Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> We often make major releases in June, just before Sharkfest. That probably
> won't happen this year. A major release now would mean either releasing 2.0
> (featuring the Qt UI) without feature parity with the GTK+ UI, or releasing
> 1.14 (featuring the GTK+ UI). I'm not particularly fond of either choice.
>
> Unless there's a compelling reason to get something out the door now, I'd
> prefer to wait until the Qt UI is ready, which raises the question of the
> definition of "ready." We've been tracking complete and pending features at
>
>     https://wiki.wireshark.org/Development/QtShark
>
> We've made a lot of progress but are still lacking many features including
> the Wireless Toolbar, a few Statistics dialogs, and quite a few Telephony
> dialogs.
IMO it would be a great disservice to our users to release Wireshark
with the current Qt state causing regressions due to missing features.
I also think that delaying our established release cycle time-wise
indefinitely would also be a disservice since Wireshark is a
professional tool and our users are expecting use to provide a new
release around June and they may have committed upgrade plans.
Implementing the remaining missing functionality in a rush and
releasing with Qt as a default UI is also something which I would not
do, because the newly implemented parts would not be tested
extensively.

The GTK+ UI is in a releasable state AFAIK thus I propose releasing
1.14 with GTK+ shortly after Sharkfest because it is the best we can
do four our users and we can fiinish the final touches during
Sharkfest.
The GTK+ UI can be made really nice on OS X using Homebrew [1] and I
think nothing prevents us from providing a native Quartz UI on OS in
our .dmg-s. I can work on this during Sharkfest.
If someone beats me to that I plan fixing the Windows GTK+ builds and
making them beautiful, too by switching to GTK+ 3.1x for 1.14. Doing
the work on the OS X part took me about a week and I expect the
Windows work to be about the same.

Cheers,
Balint

[1] http://balintreczey.hu/blog/beautiful-wireshark-on-os-x-using-homebrew-and-gtk3quartz/