How do you guys tackle a package with poorish documentation?

Veek. M vek.m1234 at gmail.com
Tue Jul 12 10:31:25 EDT 2016


I've been messing with QQ (a Chinese chat app) and started receiving a 
lot of shady traffic partly because I was stupid enough to install the 
insecure QQ=international version. 

Anyway, so I decided to write something to provide me with a diff for 
networks. Basically track my current n/w with marginal shady traffic and 
then try to track what happens when I connect.

scapy seems like the internet approved version for python but I 
installed: pypcap https://github.com/dugsong/pypcap

import pcap
for ts, pkt in pcap.pcap():
    print ts, `pkt`

which prints a timestamp and a pkt reference. Works great. Unfortunately 
I want what's in the packet and took a look at: pydoc pcap

 class pcap(__builtin__.object)
     |  pcap(name=None, snaplen=65535, promisc=True, timeout_ms=None, 
immediate=False)  -> packet capture object

So, what's a 'packet capture object'? It's not in pydoc and I then 
wasted a lot of time looking for better docs hoping it'll be in a book 
or in an on-line tutorial, and that's when I encountered scapy.
pypcap is and egg with a .so so how do you even do anything with it?

My question is: how do you guys deal with a situation like this? Do you 
look through the source code? Do you switch to scapy? Do you now look 
for books on scapy - there are quite a few, with chapters covering it.

A lot of my time goes to the dogs browsing for stuff so I was wondering 
if that's the norm? 



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