Greg Morris wrote:
I have a number of new additions to Ethereal that I want to submit. But
I know that the list was wanting only bug fixes this week prior to the
next release. Should I still submit my new additions or wait for another
week or so?
I'll let Gerald give an official answer, but it appears that he's
branched off 0.10.13; if so, it's probably OK to add new features to the
main branch, as they won't go into 0.10.13.
New Feature:
Error Equivalency Tables:
Similar to SRT functionality, but to enable, each dissector needs to add
an additional tap. (<protocol>-err) IE tcp-err. This feature parses the
packet trace and via the tap interface counts the number of errors
reported and provides a table of the composite data.
Should those errors (or, at least, the significant ones) also be marked
using the "expert" feature Ulf Lamping added - or should *repeated*
errors be so marked? I think some network analyzers' expert feature
reports problems such as "too many open errors".
I have currently done the error table tap and modifications to both the
NCP and TCP dissectors. One neat feature is the ability to highlight one
of the errors listed in the error table, right click the mouse button,
and then search the internet for the error string. (I currently default
to Google for the internet search)
Presumably it uses the "browser_open_url()" routine declared in
gtk/webbrowser.h, so that it'll open the URL correctly on:
Windows;
OS X;
UNIX+X11, if the preference for the browser "open a URL" command is set
correctly (someday, if we support a GTK+GNOME version, that version
could use the standard GNOME APIs to let you open up a browser with a
given URL, and if we ever do a Qt+KDE version, it should also do that).
I have attached a few screen shots of this new feature.
It looks as if it provides, in some ways, a summary window for the
"expert" mechanism (especially given that the TCP statistics aren't all
for errors - window updates aren't really errors).
There's currently no summary mechanism for the expert feature; perhaps
the expert feature should support both a "generic" string for items,
such as "Connection establish request" for TCP, and a "specific" string
for each item, with the latter being what's displayed in the "Expert
Info" window, and the former used to compute the summary counts for the
"error equivalence" window and to do the Web search.
We might be able to piggyback your new feature atop the "expert"
mechanism. Does that make sense?