Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] BASE_CUSTOM and 64-bit values
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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:30:39 -0700
On Mar 26, 2013, at 10:31 AM, Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I'm not 100% convinced we should though - it would be more flexible,
> but we'd be exposing some of the guts of the dissection backend into
> 'userspace' as it were. Not a particular strong objection, but
> something to keep in mind.

I'm not sure that field values should be thought of as an internal detail; I could see some language bindings, for example, wanting to translate field values into values in the language, and I could see taps wanting to request the values of specific named fields and getting them as fvalue_t's.

I *do* see the definition of a string value changing in the future (to support embedded NULs, strings whose binary representation is not valid in the encoding in question, etc.), so I don't want the current fvalue_t exposed as an unchanging structure, but we're currently not guaranteeing source or binary compatibility for plugins or code using libwireshark between major versions.