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

[Graeme Hewson <ghewson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ulf Lamping wrote:
> 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.

Sorry, I didn't have time yesterday to expand on my comment.  I meant no 
implied criticism of the User's Guide, and if you recall, I did some 
proof-reading of it.

The reason for the different names is in this message from Guy in 2000:

> I went with
>
> 	3) "${sysconfdir}/ethereal.conf" as the global preferences file
> 	   - "${sysconfdir}" is typically an "etc" directory, and
> 	   "preferences" is too generic a name, as there might be a
> 	   collision with some other program's file - and
> 	   "~/.ethereal/preferences" as the user's preference file.

However, I'd like to see the same name for the local and global files 
too.  These days, the global files are typically in 
/usr/local/share/ethereal, so I don't think Guy's comment is valid any 
more.  For compatibility, if ethereal.conf is present in the global 
directory it would be used, and if both ethereal.conf and preferences 
are present, the latter would be used, I suggest.

> 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...

I think there's still more work to do on both the guide and the man pages:

- It's one thing to use $HOME to refer to the user's home directory, but 
how do we refer to the global directory, when there's no environment 
variable for it, and it's an installation option?  Should we call it a 
"global directory" at all, or something else?  Would ${sysconfdir} be 
understandable as shorthand, or perhaps <global>?

- Is it really the case that there's no support for a global 
disabled_protos file?

- The man pages don't mention dfilters.

- Should the Ethereal man page mention cfilters under "FILES" as well as 
 Windows/Save?

- other things?