4.4. Obtain the Ethereal sources

There are several ways to obtain the sources from Ethereal's Subversion server.

[Note]Note!

The following ways to retrieve the Ethereal sources are sorted in decreasing actuality. If you plan to commit changes you've made to the sources, it's a good idea to keep your private source tree as actual as possible.

The age mentioned in the following sections will indicate, how old the most recent change in that sources will be.

4.4.1. Anonymous Subversion access

Recommended for development purposes.

Age: a few minutes.

You can use a Subversion client to download the source code from Ethereal's anonymous Subversion repository. The URL for the repository trunk is: http://anonsvn.ethereal.com/ethereal/trunk/.

[Tip]Tip!

Anonymous Subversion access can make your life much easier, compared to update your source tree by using any of the zip file methods mentioned below. Subversion handles merging of changes into your personal source tree in a very comfortable and quick way. So you can update your source tree several times a day without much effort.

See Section 2.13, “Subversion (SVN) client (optional)” how to install a Subversion client.

For example, to check out using the command-line Subversion client, you would type:

$ svn checkout http://anonsvn.ethereal.com/ethereal/trunk ethereal

The checkout has to be only done once. This will copy all the sources of the latest version (including directories) from the server to your machine. This will take some time, depending on the speed of your internet line.

4.4.2. Anonymous Subversion web interface

Recommended for development purposes, if direct Subversion access isn't possible (e.g. because of a restrictive firewall).

Age: a few minutes (same as anonymous Subversion access).

The entire source tree of the Subversion repository is available via a web interface at: http://anonsvn.ethereal.com/viewcvs/viewcvs.py/. You can view each revision of a particular file, as well as diffs between different revisions. You can also download individual files or entire directories.

4.4.3. Nightly snapshots

Well, not recommended at all.

Age: up to 24 hours.

The Subversion server will automatically generate a snapshot of Ethereal's sourcetree every night. These snapshots can be found at: http://www.ethereal.com/distribution/nightly-builds/.

If anonymous Subversion access isn't possible, e.g. if the connection to the server isn't possible because of a corporate firewall, the sources can be obtained by downloading this nightly snapshots. However, if you are going to maintain your sources in parallel to the "official" sources for some time, it's recommended to use the anonymour Subversion access if possible (believe it, it will save you a lot of time).

4.4.4. Released sources

Recommended for productive purposes.

Age: from days to weeks.

The officially released source files can be found at: http://www.ethereal.com/download.html. You should use these sources if you want to build Ethereal on your platform for productive use.

The differences between the released sources and the sources stored at the Subversion repository are keep on growing until the next release is done (at the release time, the released and latest Subversion repository versions are then identical again :-).