Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] interface options patch II

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 13:11:14 -0700

On Sep 9, 2003, at 9:33 AM, Graham Bloice wrote:

Let me know if the latest patch takes care of this. As long as device
names do not contain parens or commas, the ethereal description string
syntax should be OK. However, I'd like the syntax to be as safe as
possible. What's the possibility of future device names having parens or
commas?


I have no idea what may be in future device names. Certainly those on XP
have parens.

They do?  I thought they only had "\Device\Packet_{long_GUID_string}".

Device *descriptions* might have parens, but that's a different matter.

With your latest changes (patch III) the windows descriptions have been
removed in the Interface Options dialog, but IMHO this makes things much more difficult as you only have the actual interface names to look at which,
as I mentioned previously, are not very helpful being strings such as
"\Device\Packet_{F30D9BC7-81C8-4FF1-B98E-DDE87A2DB765}" which are somewhat
hard to relate to actual NICS.

There are at least a couple of options I see here:

1) have the description for a device, both in the drop-down list *and* in the default to the description from the OS, but let the user override it (in which case it's no longer available in either place, on the assumption that the user would have left intact whatever parts of the OS's description they considered useful):

2) have the description for a device in the drop-down list be the user-supplied description, if there is one, and otherwise use the OS's description, and in the list of interfaces in the "Interface Options" dialog box show both the OS's description *and* the user's description.