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

From: Bálint Réczey <balint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2015 11:51:36 +0200
2015-06-06 11:23 GMT+02:00 Alexis La Goutte <alexis.lagoutte@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 3:39 PM, Bálint Réczey <balint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> The question is when Wireshark Qt will be feature parity with Wireshark GTK.
> If it is for 3 or 4 month (like September/October), it is possible to wait
> to release a new major release.
I would not delay the release that long and please consider the risks
of releasing code which is tested for only a short time.

Cheers,
Balint