EtherApe

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Mercurial repo

Overview of changes in EtherApe 0.9.8 (Sunday Sep 27 2009):

Apart for the usual bug fixes, this release see a the switch to glade-3, the overdue removal of bonobo dock and several other deprecated widgets.
Most of the ui now uses directly Gtk+ instead of Gnome. At this time there isn't a real alternative to GnomeCanvas, so quite a bit of Gnome still remains.

To make partially up for the long delay, there are some new functionality as well: a node listing window, substantial performance enhancements, and some improvements here and there. See the details below.

Note the new timing defaults: out of the box, Etherape will react faster to traffic changes and give a better "feel" of current the network state.
The faster expiration will also help to reduce memory and cpu requirements. On the other hand, "forgetting" inactive nodes faster makes Etherape less suited for mid-term monitoring; the new values will be too small.

I believe this change will be useful to most people, though, and especially suited to newcomers, who often have difficulties understanding the different timing types. Experienced users can still easily adapt Etherape to their needs.

I have already mentioned the switch to mercurial. A couple months from now the CVS repository will be shut down.

Changes summary:

• Fixed bug 1713590, bad replaying of out-of-order packets (Bug report by "haywire_dk").
• Fixed bug 1435271, about box doesn't report version (Bug report by Cullen Newsom, who had to wait more than three years for this fix).
• Fixed bug 2839050, a massive memory leak reported by "psistormyamato".
• Fixed a bug causing no-data tcp packets to have incorrect port.
• Improved performance in several key areas.
• Upgraded to glade-3, removed deprecated widgets and functions, tweaked the looks a bit.
• Added --glade-file option to load a different glade file.
• Renamed --infile to --replay-file to be more consistent with the shortcut (-r).
• Option --zero-delay (-z) is now replaced by --max-delay, receiving a maximum delay in ms between packet when replaying from file.
• Revised preferences dialog. Timeouts now expressed in seconds.
• Added preference for diagram text color.
• Added port column to protocol infos (Feature request 2818525).
• Made node name and ip selectable in node/link info (FR 2818525 again).
• Preferences dialog now accepts multiple protocols for a color.
• Added a node window, showing a table with all non-expired nodes (i.e. both those visible on diagram and the inactive, hidden, but not removed ones).
• Removed several outdated preferences: diagram is always anti-aliased, links always fade on timeout and info windows show protocol data.
• Revised default timings, now geared toward instant monitoring. Previous values where more suited for mid-term analisys. Since sub-second timeouts aren't very useful, and reading milliseconds less than ideal, all expire periods now are entered in seconds.
• Etherape had always the ability to map multiple protocols to a single color, but you had to create multiple rows, manually matching the RGB code. Now the preferences dialog accepts protocols separated by ',' for the same row and also compacts automatically previously distinct rows. You can also change the row color.
• The link width slider now controls the link width/node radius ratio, so changing both node and link size will be easier, while retaining the ability to have a links smaller or greater than nodes.
• Expanded internal consistency checks.
• Info and debug levels are now enabled by defining the environment variable APE_DEBUG with values respectively info or debug (case insensitive).

Development repository switched to Mercurial (Tuesday Sep 08 2009):

Now that SourceForge officially supports Mercurial, there's no reason to still use CVS.
DVCs are faster, have much more features and imho much better suited to open source work.
Using hg should also lower the barrier for anyone wishing to hack on Etherape.

The old CVS repo will be occasionally (e.g. on releases) synchronized for a while to make life easier for packagers. Full history will be available only on hg, however.

Note:
The new mercurial repo contains almost all the past project history, but since it's a conversion between two very different systems (for example, CVS doesn't have changesets, so the converter must infer them from timestamps and commit messages), there are some differences. So, if you really want to know how the project evolved before release 0.9.7, please consult the CVS repo.

Overview of changes in EtherApe 0.9.7 (Saturday Sep 30 2006):

Bugfix release. Special thanks to Pav Lucistnik for providing patches and bug reports.

Changes summary:

• Fixed bug 1496607, thread termination failure (Bug report by Pav Lucistnik).
• Fixed bug 1496621, crash after pausing (Fix by Pav Lucistnik).
• Fixed bug 1496614, crash in initialize_ethers() (Fix by Pav Lucistnik).

Overview of changes in EtherApe 0.9.6 (Tuesday May 16 2006):

Some distributions had trouble linking correctly EtherApe.  This release should fix that.

Changes summary:

• On newer distros (like FC5) the linker was called without --export-dynamic, making EtherApe unusable.
• Fixed bug 1488215, "cancel" button on preferences dialog doesn't work.
• Updated .desktop and .spec files
• Updated debian files. Thanks to F.Peters (debian maintainer).

Overview of changes in EtherApe 0.9.5 (Saturday May 6 2006):

After the recent changes the manual was really obsolete.  This release features a completely rewritten one, properly integrated with the Gnome help browser. You'll find EtherApe under Applications - System tools.

Changes summary:

• Manual completely rewritten with docbook-XML. Now registers with scrollkeeper.
• Thanks to Jeffrey G. Gomberg, who had the patience to test and identify problems, this release features improved OSX support.
• Thanks to Ben Allen, added a new opzion, 'zero-delay' (-z) to play captured files without accounting for timestamp.  Usually EtherApe uses the timestamp to playback packets as they came in when recording. This option essentially disables this, making as if all packets came in at once. 
  As Ben said 'It provides a QUICK way to generate a graph of all of the conversations in a capture file, without having to wait the length of the capture. This is helpful for visualizing data from long (hours to days) captures'.
• Fixed a bug preventing conversations to expire properly.

All the news...