I am beginner here kindly help me out on how can i start contributing to this open source.

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We don't have an on-boarding guide as such, but a number of documents that will help a contributor:

• The Wireshark Developers Guide (WSDG). Essential reading, especially if developing on Windows.
• various documents in the source tree in docs, README.developer is essential and the others should at least be skimmed.
• The Wireshark web site page Get Involved.
• The Wiki Development page.

Edit: I would also add that the Wireshark project welcomes contributions from everybody regardless of where you are on your Wireshark "journey", simple fixes to typos and grammar in the docs are welcomed, as are extensive new code contributions.

Before you even think about contributing. See if you can take the source code and compile it for your own use. Then see if you actually understand some of the code that you compiled. And then do the same thing on the latest code that is published on git.

In my view. If you have to ask how to contribute? Then you are not a likely candidate. Most contributed because they saw a challenge/problem and they tried to solve it and wrote a bit of code to add to their own wireshark install. Then once they were comfortable with it they contribted their work.

And this applies to pretty much every open source project. You start by using what is there and then once you are compfortable you start to tweak things a bit and start to participate by listening on developer channels.

Doing relentless testing of features is another way of contributing.

Back in the days when 64 bit machines were rare I ran Sparc and Alpha systems and just recompiled source packages for them and recorded all the warnings and errors about incorrect integer usage and shared them with the authors. I was not comfortable enough to fix them but understood enough to see where they occured.

So there are many way to contribute. But somehow it must match your skills and resources.