Re: Greetings and Where to Start

[Richard Sharpe <realrichardsharpe () gmail com>]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 12:12 AM, Breanna Devore-McDonald
<Breanna.S.Devore-McDonald.1 () nd edu> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My name is Breanna and I am a junior Computer Science/ Cyber Security
> undergrad at the University of Notre Dame. I am currently in a Data
> Structures course which requires me to find an interesting open-source
> project to *hopefully* contribute to, using the knowledge I should gain
> throughout the semester in optimizing code using data structures. I recently
> heard of Wireshark through my Computer Networks course and I am very
> interested and would love to find a way to contribute. However, I have no
> idea where to start. Do you think there's any place in the Wireshark code
> where I could help? (Or maybe, if it seems Wireshark is not the right fit
> for me, do you know of any projects that could fit?)

Hi Breanna,

Wireshark is a project with lots of code and quite a few contributors,
however, we welcome more all the time.

Probably the first thing to do is to pick a distinct area of the code
to work on, and perhaps the easiest is the protocol dissectors.

Then you should try to find a dissector that has known issues and also
find one that is not too complicated.

You could start by looking in the bugzilla database, but perhaps first
you should look at the number of lines in each dissector. You can find
the dissectors in epan/dissectors when you clone the git repository.
You can clone the repository with:

  git clone https://code.wireshark.org/review/wireshark

It is probably better to do this work on Linux. If your main machine
runs Windows or Mac OS X, use a VM.

You can find the bugzilla database at: https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/

It has searching facilities, but you might need to try a few things
out to find any interesting bugs you could work on.

Working on Wireshark dissector bugs will certainly give you an
appreciation for networking protocol.

-- 
Regards,
Richard Sharpe
(何以解憂？唯有杜康。--曹操)
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