Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] preferences for plugins when you don't have the plugin...

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Dec 26, 2000 at 02:39:52PM -0800, Guy Harris wrote:
> > I think that this shouldn't generate a warning, or the 'plugin preferences'
> > should be placed in a separate preferences file, or something like that.
> 
> The plugin preferences are, as far as the preferences code is concerned,
> no different from the preferences for non-plugin dissectors - which, as
> far as I'm concerned, is as it should be; plugins *aren't* supposed to
> be radically different from other dissectors - so neither of those can
> be done by the preferences code.

An alternative might be to put the preferences for each dissector,
*regardless* of whether it's a plugin or not, into a separate file.

This might have other advantages; it might, for example, allow one not
to save *all* the current preference settings to a file - right now, the
"Save" button in "Edit->Preferences" saves *all* the preferences, but
you might have set some preference for some protocol temporarily because
it makes the dissected frames easier to read when looking for what
you're looking for right now, but you still might want to have that
preference set to some other value most of the time, for the stuff you
usually do.

If, for example, instead of piling all the preferences for all the
protocols into "Edit->Preferences", we had a menu item that popped up a
list of protocols that have preferences, and if you select one of those
it pops up a dialog box for editing only *that* protocol's preferences,
that dialog box's "Save" button could save only that protocol's
preferences.