RE: [Ethereal-dev] Developer guide and wishlist

["Donnie Hale" <lists-ethereal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for your response. I guess I'm not surprised at what you had to say.
I just wish the internal design for Ethereal could evolve more quickly to
support the way I'd like to use it.

My first question, which still hasn't been answered, was about the
developers guide:

The notes for release 0.10.7 say the developers guide has been updated. The
one I find on the wiki (Miscellaneous / Development) says it's for v0.10.6,
so I don't know if that's the latest one or not. And I don't find one at all
in the intallation from the Windows installer. Is the wiki the latest one,
or do I have to get a source release to get the latest; and if I have to use
a source release, is there a way to just create the .pdf (and not build all
the binaries)?

Could someone please answer that? Thanks again...

Donnie
 

-----Original Message-----
From: ethereal-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ethereal-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard Sharpe
Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2004 1:34 AM
To: Ethereal development
Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Developer guide and wishlist

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Donnie Hale wrote:

> My vision of a "perfect world" on this front would be Python bindings 
> to a formalized, supported, and documented "Ethereal API Library". 
> Absent the Python bindings, doing it from c/c++ is ok, too, but 
> Ethereal as a library needs to be more accessible for those of us who 
> don't have weeks of ramp-up time available to invest.

This idea has been tossed around for a long time. I recall starting on
something like that back in 2001 ...

My view was that Ethereal be split into two pieces:

 1. A dissection library that returns a tree representing
    the packet(s) handed to it. The library would have functions
    to allow you to search a dissected packet for fields and values
    and so forth.

 2. The various front ends that display dissected packets.

> What are your thoughts on this? How feasible is this in the near-term? 
> Can this be added to the wishlist?

I don't think this is feasible in the near term. There is too much display
handling (whether for a GUI or for terminal display) intertwined with the
packet dissection functions.

Perhaps it is something we should attempt for Ethereal V2.

Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]richardsharpe.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org,
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com

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