Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] patches to add interface descriptions

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 09:47:41PM -0400, Nathan Jennings wrote:
> > If so, then perhaps it should default that description to the one the OS 
> > supplies, and let the user override that, rather than having two 
> > descriptions on OSes where the OS supplies one (currently only Windows, 
> > but at some point libpcap might dig up descriptions on some UNIXes) - 
> > the OS description is often just a model name, and an explicit 
> > user-supplied description might render the OS description unnecessary 
> > (not that a model name is all that useful on a multi-homed machine with 
> > multiple interfaces of the same type anyway).
> 
> Yeah, I thought about that too... the OS may provide a description. But, 
> like you mentioned, sometimes you may have two or more of the same 
> type/brand of NIC and that's not helpful.

Yes, that's the point - if the user has supplied their own name for an
interface, it probably has all the information they need, and the
OS-supplied description won't be useful, so there's not much use I can
see for supplying both of them, so I think just showing one name, and
having that name default to the OS-supplied name if present, and letting
the user replace that name, would be the right thing to do.

I also think the UI for letting the user specify the names shouldn't
involve having them construct a single string with all the names and
descriptions, it should let the user select an interface and give it a
name - for example, have the "Capture" preferences page look like:

				Inteface:  [fxp0                     ][v]

      Capture packets in promiscuous mode: []

      Update list of packets in real time: []

      Automatic scrolling in live capture: []

	       Interface fxp0 description: [                             ]

	        Interface lo0 description: [                             ]