Huge thanks to our Platinum Members Endace and LiveAction,
and our Silver Member Veeam, for supporting the Wireshark Foundation and project.

Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Plan to make NPcap available for Wireshark

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2015 09:56:24 -0700
On Jul 7, 2015, at 8:56 AM, Joerg Mayer <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> While I understand the logic behind our argument, I don't agree with it:
> With the possibility of winpcap and npcap diverging, that may at one point
> in time mean diverging and incompatible APIs. Also, what happens if a user
> wants to use Wireshark with winpcap and also wants to use npcap? Does your
> proposal have a solution to this?

I would hope that the long term plan is to incorporate NPcap's capabilities into WinPcap, now that the WinPcap development process is being opened up.  That would presumably mean that, in the long term, there's only one library, with one API.

(I'd also hope that the libpcap part of the code will just be taken from the libpcap tree, so that the only APIs *not* shared between libpcap and WinPcap would be the Windows-specific ones - although many of those are in the libpcap source - and whatever we export from Packet.dll, although Packet.dll explicitly does *not* offer a stable API.)