Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Remaining Wireshak stuff during FOSDEM

[Sylvain Munaut <246tnt@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

> - CSN1 decoding is manually coded right now - and wrong in some places.
>  Automatic creation like ASN.1 possible but rather hard problem.

Something pretty important to me is that the code can be modified to
"look" nice.

For eg. when you look at the TETRA dissectors that uses ASN.1
autogenerated stuff the field values are presented but the names are
obscure and most of the time you have no idea what they mean unless
you have the spec opened at the right page beside you.

While on the other hand when you look at the output of the manually
crafted CSN1 (well, it uses a CSN1 helpers of course) code of GMR1,
each value is nicely presented, with field meaning from the specs if
appropriate and the value properly decoded (like if an integer
represents a frequency in 0.5 Hz increment, it will display that).

So IMHO the approach currently used right now (a csn1 generic
framework + description of the structures in specific files) is not
bad, it just misses something to "pre generate" all the boilerplate
stuff from a .csn1 file.

Just my 2c.

Cheers,

    Sylvain