Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Building ethereal on win32

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 20:20:40 -0800
On Sun, Mar 18, 2001 at 11:27:34AM +0100, Affe Egnell wrote:
> I'm trying to find the source code to ethereal so that I can build it my self.
> Where can I find it??

	http://www.ethereal.com/download.html#sources

Note that the source code is in the form of a gzipped tarball; I don't
know what tools there are on Windows for unpacking those other than
gzip/gunzip and tar - those are available, for example, as part of
Cygwin:

	http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/

(which also contains other tools you may need in order to build
Ethereal, so you'd probably want to download it anyway).

See the "README.win32" file that comes with the Ethereal source for more
information on building Ethereal on Windows.

> I would also like to have some docs about the code, it would be easier to
> make changes then...or perhaps the code is well documented...

The "doc" directory of the Ethereal source tree contains
"README.design", "README.developer", and "README.tvbuff"; they are,
perhaps, not the best documentation there could be on the code - in
fact, the first document there says

	Unfortunately, the closest thing to a design document is the
	"README.developer" document in the "doc" directory of the Ethereal
	source tree; however, although that's useful for people adding new
	protocol dissectors to Ethereal, it doesn't describe the operations of
	the "core" of Ethereal.

	We have no document describing that;

and then gives a *very* quick summary (from about 10 km above the
surface :-)) of part of the internals of Ethereal.  The other two
documents are primarily intended for people writing dissectors for
particular protocols, rather than for people writing stuff other than
dissectors.

There are comments in the code itself that may help.

If you're not familiar with the GLib library or the GTK+ GUI toolkit,
the documentation for GLib 1.2[.x] and GTK+ 1.2[.x] can be found on the
GTK+ Web site:

	http://www.gtk.org/

There's both tutorial and reference information there - use the GLib and
GTK+ 1.2 reference information, *not* the 2.0 reference information
(which is probably subject to change in any case, as GLib 2.0 and GTK+
2.0 are still being developed).