This page helps us make educated decisions about how far we can bump our minimum library versions by letting us know what library versions are supported on different operating system versions. Linux is somewhat special here because it tends to be hard to upgrade these libraries without changing entire versions. Although we have more control over libraries on Windows and macOS, we are still often limited by official support for specific OS versions.

• Library and tool versions
  • Qt
  • GLib and GTK+
  • GnuTLS
  • Libgcrypt
  • CMake
  • Python
  • Lua
  • Nghttp2
  • Libssh
• Linux Distributions
  • RHEL/CentOS
  • Fedora
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
  • openSUSE
  • Debian
  • Ubuntu
• macOS
• Windows

Library and tool versions

This sections tracks versions and release dates of various libraries and tools.

Qt

Release dates can be found in Qt-X.Y-release articles at https://wiki.qt.io/Category:Release

The Qt Company officially supports the following platforms and configurations.

The highlighted Wireshark versions below mark the Qt version that is shipped with the macOS and Windows installers. For supported macOS hardware and maximum macOS versions, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS#Hardware_compatibility

GLib and GTK+

Note: GTK+ support was completely dropped in Wireshark 3.0 (v2.9.0rc0-33-g36dc5781ba), so we don't bother tracking it anymore (x)

GnuTLS

Note: GnuTLS has a stable branch, and sometimes a development branch and/or a previous stable branch. These are not always obvious, as the development branch becomes the stable branch when it is deemed ready; e.g. in July 2018 3.5.x was the stable branch (announcement), 3.6.x was the development branch (announcement), 3.3.x was the previous stable branch receiving bug-fixes (announcement), and 3.4.x was unsupported.

Libgcrypt

CMake

See also https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/community/-/wikis/CMake-Versions-on-Linux-Distros for a longer list of distributions. See also https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/990#issuecomment-245112823 for a history of CMake version + changes.

Python

Python 3.6 or newer has become required since v3.7.1rc0-315-gdac75fba7f. The test suite requires pytest and pytest-xdist. Pytest must be at least 3.9.0 due to the use of the tmp_path fixture.

On older systems, you can install it via: pip3 install pytest pytest-xdist

Lua

Lua 5.1 and 5.2 have been the only supported versions due to the bitop library (Bug 10881). Lua 5.3 and 5.4 will be the only supported versions in Wireshark 4.4.0 (Lua BitOp has been ported to Lua 5.3 and 5.4, though the newer native Lua bit operation support is also available.)

Almost all current Linux and other UN*X distributions have a Lua 5.3 or 5.4 package, and most have a Lua 5.1, 5.2, or LuaJIT (largely 5.2) package.

Nghttp2

nghttp2 is required for complete HTTP/2 support. It also powers HTTP/2 support in curl, and should be increasingly available. The package name is typically "libnghttp2".

The minimum version is 1.11.0 as of April 2022 (v3.7.0rc0-1902-g91987dc0ab), to eliminate the need for a deprecated function.

Libssh

libssh (not to be confused with libssh2) is used by several of the extcaps.

Linux Distributions

Note: This site allows you to enter a package name and see which Red Hat-based distributions use what version of the package.

https://pkgs.org/ also provided a service to identify the latest versions.

https://distrowatch.com/ is also another good source for seeing package versions in various distributions.

RHEL/CentOS

Latest versions are listed, earlier versions are between parentheses.

Note: EPEL is an optional repository for extra packages.

Fedora

Releases can be found at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases. Every 6 months a new version is released with 13 months of support.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

Ten years of General Support for a major version, with a six month window to upgrade to the latest Service Pack after it is released. Version numbering skipped from 12 to 15. As of version 15 openSUSE and SLES closely track each other.

Building with Qt6 on SLES and openSUSE is tricky because the default compiler is gcc-7.5.0, which has incomplete C++17 support (and Qt6 requires C++17). It will error complaining about #include <filesystem> statements (on gcc 7 these must be #include <experimental/filesystem> - https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/status.html) unless a different C++ compiler is installed and used.

openSUSE

Version numbering changed over time: ..., 13.2, Leap 42.1, ..., Leap 42.3, Leap 15.0. From openSUSE Leap: Each major version at least 36 months lifetime, until the next major Leap version is available, with a six month window to upgrade to the latest minor release. Minor releases are expected to be roughly annually, thus giving approximately an 18 months total lifetime. Until openSUSE 13.2: 8 month release cycle, 18 months lifetime, see https://en.opensuse.org/Lifetime

Search for packages in openSUSE here: https://software.opensuse.org/search

Debian

Release EOL information

Ubuntu

Releases are on a 6 month release cycle, 9 month (regular), 5 years (LTS) lifetime.

There are PPAs for focal (and earlier) with Qt 6.2 and Qt 5.15 packages backported from later releases.

macOS

Third party libraries can be installed on macOS using the tools/macos-setup.sh script in the Wireshark sources (or macosx-setup.sh in the top-level directory in source releases up to 2.4.x). You can show a list of libraries and their versions by running grep '\\\_VERSION=\\\[0-9\\\]' tools/macos-setup.sh.

Many developers also install libraries using Homebrew and the tools/macos-setup-brew.sh script.

Windows

FOSS library packaging and distribution on Windows has historically been a mess, but things are improving. Two notable projects that might fix this are vcpkg and Conan. Neither of them provide packages for all of the libraries that we use, so we maintain repositories of 64-bit packages which are installed using tools/win-setup.ps1 in the Wireshark sources.

Imported from https://wiki.wireshark.org/Development/Support_library_version_tracking on 2020-08-11 23:13:11 UTC