Getting involved with Wireshark (was: Re: What Wireshark base version to use for customization)

[Peter Wu <peter () lekensteyn nl>]

Hi,

(This is kind of off-topic, start a new thread for such questions.)

On Wednesday 10 December 2014 15:29:03 pogiako wrote:
> I'm looking for something something to work on for my thesis. I'm a Free 
> Software guy and I thought of contributing to Wireshark is great idea. 
> I'm doing an exploratory project (Like to find something out or to prove 
> something), more on research. I don't code, I only know basic C. I have 
> the K&R 2nd E. book, will that help? I have up to April or May for this.

K&R is sufficient to learn the basics of the C language, but you can't
learn without actually practising.

I started contributing to Wireshark when I noticed that SSL decryption
was not working in one case. It turned out that some numbers were
missing, so I wrote my first Wireshark patch to solve that[1]. Moral of
the story: you do not really need deep Wireshark knowledge to write such
a patch and the best way to get involved is to fix an issue you
encounter while using Wireshark.

A good way to get acquainted with Wireshark is to write a dissector. See
doc/README.dissector (and doc/README.developer) for details. Once you
get more familiar, consider skimming the bug tracker
(https://bugs.wireshark.org/) for issues that can be fixed. Type in your
favorite protocol/feature (e.g. "ssl", "http" or "gtk") and try to find
out whether you can fix it or not. A good learning experience even if
you do not manage to fix the bug.
-- 
Kind regards,
Peter
https://lekensteyn.nl

 [1]: https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=9144

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