----- Original Message -----
From: "Guy Harris" <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Ethereal development" <ethereal-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 10:42 AM
Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Preparing for 1.0
Gerald Combs wrote:
Enough major changes have been introduced since the last release to
warrant bumping the minor revision. I figure we may as well bump it to
0.99.0 in order to prepare for an impending 1.0 release.
...
If the Wiretap API/ABI is also to be made stable, it should be ready to
handle pcap-NG, even if it doesn't have pcap-NG support; there are changes
we'd want for that (e.g., support for comments in capture files - there
are some other capture file types that could use that - and support for
the information about network interfaces in the capture file).
I'm not an expert in wiretap (and I think I had a look at it last time more
than one year ago...), in any case pcap-NG may require the following
features ("may require" in the sense that NTAR *does* require them):
Wiretap saves the offset of each packet into memory to support random access
to the file. The offsets should be 64 bits, and together with the offsets
you need to save the byte order of that block, or alternatively the ID of
the section containing the packet (a file can contain multiple sections,
each one with a different byte order, different interface descriptions, bla
bla bla).
Probably the list of interfaces and/or sections in a file will be saved in
some specific pcap-NG structure used by wiretap, so no direct modification
should be done in wiretap for this (not 100% sure, correct me if I'm wrong).
Have a nice day
GV
