[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sep 10, 2003, at 9:53 PM, Naveen Kumar Kaushik wrote:

> > http://www.ethereal.com/download.html#binaries
> yes there are many platforms to consider but a large number of people 
> use
> either Unix like OS (Unix,FreeBSD,Linux ) or win32.

The only OS in that list that's not UNIX-like or Win32 is BeOS; all but 
two (BeOS, Win32) in that platform *are* UNIX-like, and you can't treat 
them as being all the same.

>  I personally feel this
> is a reason to take window compilation seriously since atleast on Unix 
> type
> OS compilation is smooth. Please correct me if i am wrong .

For at least some Unixes, it's not as smooth as you might think.

There are issues of:

	1) compilers - not everybody contributing code is aware of all the 
issues in the "Portability" section of "doc/README.developer" (which is 
why Alfred Chin sent in those patches);

	2) libraries - some libraries might require non-obvious additional 
libraries on some platforms (SNMP libraries requiring -lkstat on 
Solaris, or various crypto libraries on some Linux distributions);

and possibly other issues.