[Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 3:42 PM, Mark Vitale <mvitale@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I've used Wireshark for years but I'm brand new to Wireshark development.

Welcome :)

My understanding from reading the developer docs is that I should open bug reports and attach my patches
to the tickets.   These patches should apply to the tip, not to a particular release.  Do you ever
make exceptions to this policy?  That is, would you accept patches against 1.10?

 

Only bug-fixes and security patches go into the stable branches, so patches that fall in those categories are welcome. Most of the time in those cases people provide a patch against trunk and then we backport it, though sometimes a backport is not possible for whatever reason.

If not, I'll make a new vm with a Linux distro that's not so conservative in its repo policies.
Is there a particular distro you would recommend for Wireshark development, or doesn't it matter much?
My only requirements are the need to use a package manager (yum/apt/whatever) to automate my
dependency checking, and that its repos be current enough to configure and build the latest Wireshark.

Ubuntu seems to be a popular choice. Our buildbot runs 12.04 (the latest LTS release) to build trunk, so you shouldn't have any issues with that or any more recent version. As Anders says though, this is probably a moot point.

Cheers,
Evan