Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] RFC: Proper seperation of wiretap code

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 01:27:10 -0800
On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 10:20:25AM +0100, Joerg Mayer wrote:
> Something that I've been wondering about:
> Currently, we are calling libpcap functions directly from tethereal.c,
> main.c etc. As we use wiretap to handle the capturing, file handling
> etc should the pcap stuff be restricted to wiretap?

It might make sense to put the capture stuff (done by calls to
libpcap/WinPcap) into Wiretap.

> Also, do we currently have a well-defined interface into wiretap?

We don't have a published API spec, and I don't think the API is "done"
yet, so I don't yet feel comfortable publishing a spec and freezing the
API.  (For one thing, time permitting, there will probably be new
capabilities added both to libpcap and to the libpcap file format, which
might require API changes to support in Wiretap - it's somewhat of a
pain to add new capabilities to libpcap, given that its API *is*
published and can't be changed incompatibly; at least some of the
changes I'm thinking of making add new APIs that would be extensible,
e.g. by using attribute/value lists.)