On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 06:35:32AM +0100, ewitness - Ben Fowler wrote:
> >...the only two GUIs for which there's support in the current CVS tree are
> >GTK+ 1.2[.x] and GTK+ 2.x; ...
>
> Is this a permanent thing?
That depends on whether anybody adds it.
> Alternatively, do you plan on adding further GUI support,
If "you" refers to me rather than to the Ethereal developer group as a
whole - I might do so someday. I might not. I would say that counts as
a "no" answer, as I don't *plan* to do it, although I might end up doing
it at some point.
If it refers to the developer group as a whole, I don't know whether
anybody else plans to do it. (There's Packetyzer:
http://www.packetyzer.com/
but I view that as an example of another user interface built atop the
Ethereal core, rather than as a Windows GUI for Ethereal, as the GUI
looks very different from that of Ethereal - not that there's anything
wrong with that.)
> or using a framework such as wxWindows which has support for multiple
> GUIs?
wxWindows has support for *some* GUIs; unfortunately, it doesn't have
support for a GUI that I think would be of interest to many Ethereal
users, namely the KDE GUI.
A wxWindows GUI might be useful as a way of implementing *some* of the
GUIs, but it wouldn't be sufficient to provide *all* the GUIs people
might want. (It also wouldn't be sufficient to provide a text-mode
curses-based UI; people have expressed interest in that as well.)
Note, however, that, at some point, I'd like to change the packet list
window to use widgets that, instead of having to be given column strings
at the time a row is added to the list, calls back to the core code to
get the text for the columns, as that could reduce the memory
requirements of Ethereal significantly and would speed up certain
operations substantially. If wxWindows doesn't have a widget that does
that on all the platforms with which we'd want to use it, and doesn't
allow such a widget to be added for all those platforms, that might
either render it impossible to use wxWindows or might cause the
wxWindows version to use significantly more memory and perform some
operations significantly slower than other versions.
(Yes, I know, many toolkits don't have such a widget. Ethereal, when
built to use those toolkits, would supply its own widget in those
cases.)
> >The difficulties would probably be different from those with GTK+, as we
> >wouldn't be implementing the exact semantics of GTK+; instead, we'd be
> >implementing higher-level GUI semantics. ...
>
> Would you accept patches intended to create such a product?
Well, I can't speak for all the developers. I'd have no problem with
patches of that sort, as long as they're not "patches to make Ethereal
use Aqua as well as GTK+" but "patches to make it possible to have
Ethereal use several different GUI toolkits, plus patches to make it use
Aqua in that framework".