Re: Ethereal port naming question.

[email protected] wrote:

> In my master thesis project I'm trying to create a native
> Aqua build of Ethereal for Mac OS X.

Good!

BTW, can it handle doing more than one capture at the same time, or 
having more than one capture open at the same time?  OS X is biased 
towards the notion that only one process running an app is active at any 
given time, with all windows for the app handled by that one process, 
and, unfortunately, Wireshark isn't currently well structured to handle 
that.

> I'm developing GUI in Cocoa

Even better!  (Maybe Leopard will finally support Emacs keystrokes in 
Carbon text boxes and the like, the way the Cocoa versions already do, 
but, until then....)

> and as a core I used etheral-0.10.13 source code (under GNU GPL).

You might want to look at the latest version - Wireshark 0.99.2 - or 
even the top-of-tree Subversion code.

> It will be a small subset of full functionality that Ethereal gives.

So what parts will be missing?  (A full port would be a significant 
amount of work.)

> I noticed that Ethereal is registered trademark of Ethereal, Inc.
> I would like to ask is it illegal if I call my project XEthereal?

As Joerg Mayer noted, that's not really up to the Ethereal developers 
any more.

If you start with Wireshark, "XEthereal" would *definitely* be the wrong 
name. :-)  I don't know whether Gerald Combs would mind a name with 
Wireshark in it, but he probably wouldn't mind, especially if the code 
could be incorporated into the main Wireshark code base.

I don't know whether "X" at the beginning of the name would be best, 
though; these days, "X" at the beginning of an new application's name 
isn't used a lot to indicate that it has an X11-based GUI, but in the 
old days of X11, that was used (nowadays, the letters "G" and "K" tend 
to be the ones used for that :-)), so it *might* be a bit confusing. 
I'm not sure what'd be a better version, other than, say, "MacWireshark" 
(although if, as, and when we have an official Aqua-based release, we'll 
probably just call it "Wireshark", just as we call the Windows version 
"Wireshark" and would probably continue to do so even if it didn't use 
any GTK+ code).