Re: [Ethereal-dev] ethereal.conf vs. preferences

[Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>]

Graeme Hewson wrote:

> The User's Guide and the About dialog say the global settings file is 
> called "preferences", but the ethereal and tethereal man pages say 
> it's called "ethereal.conf"; the man pages are correct.
That's explained easily, as I've written both the User's Guide and the 
About dialog, but not the man pages. I was assuming that there are 
differences between unix and windows, as I didn't had a reference at 
hand (or at least didn't thought about the manpage) while writing these 
documentation, and I've never used the "ethereal.conf" file at all.

Is there a reason that different names are used for these two files? I 
know this schema as the global/local/command line preferences from other 
programs and I think it's quite powerful and easy to understand. 
However, I'd expected to have the global and local files have the same 
name. Is this a usual behvaiour that these two filenames differ?

I've fixed the "User's Guide" the way it currently is.

> Also, there's inconsistency within and between these documents about 
> the other global and personal configuration files.  The User's Guide 
> doesn't mention the global directory for Unix (equivalent to 
> %ETHEREAL% on Windows) for all files.  The man pages give various 
> directories for this (/etc or /usr/local/etc).
Same reason, I'm almost only working on Windows so I don't know much 
about the various unix versions and just didn't had the knowledge to add 
that info. The former User's Guide didn't gave any information about it, 
so I had to do some "guesswork".

Well, at the time writing the User's Guide I was asking for a review, 
but didn't got lot's of comments. So we can change it now to the better 
(about a year later ;-)

I would like to get the description as accurate as possible, but got a 
little bit lack of knowledge, so you might be able to help me here. I've 
put an updated "User's Guide" at the wiki, at 
http://wiki.ethereal.com/Development
so please comment...

Regards, ULFL