On Fri, Jul 13, 2001 at 10:36:57AM -0400, Christopher Kelley wrote:
> Has there been any discussion of implementing a general (non-dissector)
> plug-in framework for ethereal? I've been browsing the archives, but didn't
> see any. An example of what I mean is the tcp graphing patch at
> (http://kostra.uh.cz/ethereal/). I know there is debate about where that
> belongs in the core of ethereal. Maybe one solution would be to have a
> general plug-in framework so that you don't have to recompile to add these
> modules. Then users that want extra functionality can easily add it and
> those that don't don't have to plug it in.
This is a neat idea. It would make programming such modules less
hackish. When I wrote the tcp graphing code I missed some sort of
internal (plugin, if you will) API that would enable me to say "dear
ethereal core, give me IP header of frame #66 or NULL if there isn't
any". If ethereal had a plugin API I could support any link layer
protocol supported by ethereal, even those I never heard about. In
absence of such an API I need to be concerned by whether the frame I'm
dealing with is Ethernet, FDDI, Token Ring or another link layer
protocol. The result is that I can support Ethernet and PPP only using a
simple heuristics - and even this support is a hack.
pvl
