On Thu, Jul 13, 2000 at 09:37:30AM -0400, Mnev, Arthur (Exchange) wrote:
> I'm new to ethereal and had a generic question:
>
> is there a collection of plugins for WIN32 that are available for everyone's
> use?
I don't know of any public collection; plugin support was, I think,
originally put in to allow dissectors for proprietary non-public
protocols to be plugged into Ethereal.
Ethereal ships with one dissector, a dissector for the protocol
used by the Dearborn Group's Gryphon box to connect automotive
diagnostic tools to a LAN:
http://www.dgtech.com/news.html#gryphon
which was made a plugin as it's a somewhat specialized protocol -
although the same could perhaps be said about some other protocols with
dissectors built into Ethereal. At this point, I view it as being a
plugin as much to
1) make it a piece of sample code for other plugin writers;
2) provide code to let us test to make sure we haven't done
something to break plugin support, etc.;
as to keep it somehow separate from the "core" of Ethereal.
People tend to contribute protocol dissectors as built-in dissectors
rather than plugins, so I'd expect most of the non-specialized protocols
(and even some specialized protocols) to be available in Ethereal as
distributed.
