Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Portable Wireshark Settings

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2007 15:21:29 -0700
Misc wrote:

Regular (non-U3) portable applications:
1. Do not write to Windows Registry. That is a must.

Wireshark doesn't do that (although that's mainly a result of it having been written as a UN*X application).

2. Do not write to system, AppData, and other folders outside of their
own program folder, unless the path is configurable by the user.

As per my mail, the standard Wireshark distribution *should* write to the AppData folder, so a special portable distribution would be required.

I phrased my question incompletely; what I really wanted to know is what's done to take an application not originally designed as a portable application, and intended to be able to be run as a non-portable application, and arrange that packages be available to run it as a portable application while continuing to have packages available to run it as a non-portable application.

The page at

	http://portableapps.com/development

that Ulf mentioned discusses this.

If you have several computers with same software installed,
synchronizing their settings can be a real nightmare. But if you simply
use portable applications, it's very, very easy. You just capy the
folder with portable apps to the new computer, and it just works! No
installation, no configuration, no headaches... :)

...unless you have multiple users on the machine using the same application, in which case their settings are shared, whether they want that or not. (And, yes, that happens even with Windows.) It's not as if portable is all benefits and no costs....

(There's also the question of an app that's fetched from a network file server....)