Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Autogenerating the Code for the DOCSIS TLV dissector
On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Anand V. Narwani wrote:
> Folks,
> After talking to others regarding this, I think there may be some value in
> coming up with some mechanism to automagically generate the dissector for
> DOCSIS Appendix C Type/Length/Value fields.
> One mechanism that was suggested was to use an XML document to describe the
> fields and then generate the code based on that. Another suggestion was to
> read the XML document at runtime. I prefer the former solution as it
> appears that libxml2 may not exist on all platforms (Someone, please
> correct me if I'm mistaken).
> My questions are as follows:
> 1. Does this sound like a reasonable solution? Can anyone provide a
> better one?
This sounds like a very good approach. I started down this road for
something else (SMB) a while ago, but never finished it :-(
> 2. Does anyone know if an XML parser is available by default in Perl or
> Python ? My concern is for users who attempt to build this without Perl or
> Python on their system. I suppose we could distribute the generated C
> files just like we do for the generated C files for Lex/Yacc.
There is one, but, it is not, I believe, part of standard Perl libs.
Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe@xxxxxxxxxx, rsharpe@xxxxxxxxx,
sharpe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
