> I have insinuated my way onto the team by contributing code and promising
> to contribute more :-) At some stage I am going to have to add my name to
> the list of contributors on the help screen :-)
So what exactly *are* the rules for addition to the AUTHORS file and
help screen? I didn't bother adding myself to the former, but Laurent
Deniel included me when he put the author list in the latter.
(Presumably if you're in one list you should be in the other....)
> I am starting to wonder if we have any standards around information
> presented by the various decode routines. I am looking for some guidelines,
> and don't mind being part of the solution (ie, coming up with guidelines if
> they are needed). Are there any guidelines? As I am looking more and more
> at TCP level protocols (like SMTP, DNS Zone Transfers, SSH, Telnet, etc),
> it may be that there is a need for such guidelines.
Guidelines of what sort? What stuff to display, how to display it, when
to have a line that can be opened to show more details, and stuff such
as that?
> 1. It does not presently handle enough protocols.
For any given protocol analyzer, at any time in its life, there probably
exists at least one person who could say that about it. :-)
("snoop" is, not surprisingly, pretty good for looking at ONC RPC
services, but it doesn't do DNS, nor does it do SMB, and it barely does
HTTP; NetMon, not surprisingly, does a reasonable job at SMB, but only
does those ONC RPC protocols with fixed port numbers, and doesn't do
TFTP; I think Sniffers might do a reasonable job on most protocols, but,
then again, you have to wait for a new release for a brand-new protocol,
unless they let you write your own decoders.)
I.e., that'll always be true for somebody, but at least we can, over
time, reduce the number of people that would say that about Ethereal.
> 2. It does not have an ADDRESS/NAME table as far as I can see. There are
> many names in other protocols other than DNS names, and NetMon finds them
> and places them in an ADDRESS/NAME table. I would like to see support for
> this added.
There's the table maintained by "resolv.c", but that's only for IP and
Ethernet addresses, and we don't currently have NetMon's ability to
have protocol parsers add names to the table.
> 3. At the moment it does not keep any stats, like number of packets in a
> trace, number of IP packets, etc.
When capturing a trace, it counts the packets of various types (to show
it in the capture progress window), but it doesn't do that for a trace
it reads.
> 5. The GUI needs some improving. We need ways to set defaults so that
> ethereal always starts up the way an individual like it. Maybe we need a
> .etherealrc file that contains startup instructuons?
Well, there *is* ~/.ethereal/preferences, although there are currently
only 5 things it specifies.
