On Feb 15, 2013, at 2:20 PM, Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> For Linux and *BSD, the developers/distributors largely have their own package collections, which include Wireshark.
>
> For OS X and Windows, the vendors may have App Stores, to which Wireshark would almost certainly not be admitted, but they don't have any equivalent to the package collections provided by Linux distributors and *BSD teams. For those OSes, we act as "independent software vendors", even though we don't charge for the application, and offer the software through our own Web site.
>
> There do exist *third-party* package collections for OS X, such as MacPorts - I don't know of any for Windows - but we don't use them. I think relying on an OS X package collection would be overkill, as somebody who only wants a packet analyzer for OS X shouldn't have to install some Unix-geek-oriented package manager.
I'm not following you - I'm not talking about adding wireshark to MacPorts or yum, etc. (it's already available through them) I'm talking about letting a non-developer common user update Wireshark within Wireshark. Like a "Help->Update Wireshark" menu thing popping up a dialog box, with settings for frequency of auto-checking, and for auto-retrieval, and auto-installing. (though for Linux the last one would not apply)
And this would be disabled by default.
>> Even for Linux, you could just have wireshark check for a new version and tell the user. (if they enable such auto-checking)
>
> What is the user to do when informed that a new version exists? There's no guarantee that "apt-get update wireshark" or "yum update" or Synaptics Package Manager or... will give you that new version. At least on some distributions, the package management software will check for new versions in its repository and will offer them to the user; would that not be sufficient?
Yeah for Linux this idea might be overkill, but basically I just meant that Wireshark would notify you a new version is available. How you get that new version is between you and [name_your_package_management_system]. If you use yum with a cron job, for example, you simply wouldn't enable this mechanism in Wireshark to begin with. And it's likely many Linux users wouldn't anyway, as they're a fickle lot. ;)
-hadriel