Chapter 6. Introduction

Table of Contents

6.1. Source overview
6.2. Coding styleguides
6.3. The GLib library

6.1. Source overview

Ethereal consists of the following major parts:

  • Packet dissection - in the / and /epan directory

  • File I/O - using Ethereal's own wiretap library

  • Capture - using the libpcap/winpcap library

  • User interface - using the GTK (and corresponding) libraries

  • Help - using an external webbrowser and GTK text output

Beside this, some other minor parts and additional helpers exist.

Currently there's no clean seperation of the modules in the code. However, as the development team switched from CVS to SVN some time ago, directory cleanup are much easier now. So there's a chance that the directory structure will become clean in the future.