Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Anyone of the developers going to support Win 98 (and alike)

From: Claudia Becker <c.becker@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 16:15:42 +0200
Hi Ulf, hi List!

I have a dinosaur. It's a Windows Nt 4.0 with 128 MB RAM. For my purpose
everything works fine. Normally I only use wireshark for dissecting packages
that we have captured with our own software. Last Friday I installed the
current Wireshark release 0.99.3, but didn't tested it until now.
Because of your question I started today a capture and everything was OK.
Wireshark-0.99.3 could also read a file in Catapult DCT2000 format.
Sadly I have not the time to put wireshark to the acid test.

Greetings, Claudia 

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: wireshark-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:wireshark-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]Im Auftrag von Ulf Lamping
Gesendet: Samstag, 26. August 2006 14:32
An: wireshark-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Betreff: [Wireshark-dev] Anyone of the developers going to support Win98
(and alike) any further? Otherwise we should "officially" drop support
of it!


Hi List!

The current situation of Win98/95/ME (and Nt 4.0) support is 
unsatisfactory IMHO.

Telling our users "it may or may not work" isn't very nice if we really 
now that it won't work and certainly will never work anymore in the future.

Our current Wireshark releases 0.99.2 / 0.99.3 won't work with Win9x at 
all, because of the Unicode problems,
see bug 964: http://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=964

However, there are other problems here as well:

- GTK2.8 (and higher) definitely won't even work with 9x
- WinPcap no longer actively supports Win9x (so it may or may not work)
- Microsoft don't support 9x any longer

I would guess, that the situation with NT 4.0 is very similar.


Is there any developer willing to support Win9x based systems any longer?
This wouldn't be too much effort, but there's a lot of other work left 
and I don't have the time and motivation to support these old systems 
myself.

If there's no one else willing to support these systems, we should 
officially drop the support and note this in the documentation, wiki and 
elsewhere.
This will enable us to switch the Win32 GTK version to the latest 2.8.20 
without any hassle,
as this *may* fix some GUI related problems (or at least enables us to 
write bugreports against the latest available Win32 GTK version).

Regards, ULFL

P.S: Telling our users (in the documentation) that Ethereal 0.99.0 
(which includes WinPcap 3.1) was the last known version to work with Win 
9x is a good idea IMHO.
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