Preface
Foreword This book tries to give you a guide to start your own experiments into the wonderful world of Wireshark development. Developers who are new to Wireshark often have a hard time getting their development environment up and running. This is especially true for Win32 developers, as a lot of the tools and methods used when building Wireshark are much more common in the UNIX world than on Win32. The first part of this book will describe how to set up the environment needed to develop Wireshark. The second part of this book will describe how to change the Wireshark source code. We hope that you find this book useful, and look forward to your comments.
Who should read this document? The intended audience of this book is anyone going into the development of Wireshark. This book is not intended to explain the usage of Wireshark in general. Please refer the Wireshark User's Guide about Wireshark usage. By reading this book, you will learn how to develop Wireshark. It will hopefully guide you around some common problems that frequently appear for new (and sometimes even advanced) developers of Wireshark.
Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the whole Wireshark team for their assistance. In particular, the authors would like to thank: Gerald Combs, for initiating the Wireshark project. Guy Harris, for many helpful hints and his effort in maintaining the various contributions on the mailing lists. The authors would also like to thank the following people for their helpful feedback on this document: XXX - Please give feedback :-) And of course a big thank you to the many, many contributors of the Wireshark development community!
About this document This book was developed by Ulf Lamping. It is written in DocBook/XML. You will find some specially marked parts in this book: This is a warning! You should pay attention to a warning, as otherwise data loss might occur. This is a note! A note will point you to common mistakes and things that might not be obvious. This is a tip! Tips will be helpful for your everyday work developing Wireshark.
Where to get the latest copy of this document? The latest copy of this documentation can always be found at: &WiresharkDevsGuidePage; in PDF (A4 and US letter), HTML (single and chunked) and CHM format.
Providing feedback about this document Should you have any feedback about this document, please send it to the authors through &WiresharkDevMailList;.