Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [ethereal-dev] bug in latest packet_ldap.c (CVS 1.4)

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On another note, any reason ethereal doesn't support writing gzip'd
> files?

Because Wiretap doesn't. :-)

As for why Wiretap doesn't, with some capture file formats I think it'd
be impossible, as the capture files can't be written sequentially;
however, Wiretap could, if asked to write out a compressed capture file
in a format that can't be written sequentially, return a new WTAP_ERR
code that tells its caller that it can't write out a compressed file.

> There also appear to be a lot of opens and closes.

Could you enumerate them?  Some of them might be necessary, but some of
them might just be bogus and unnecessary.

(We currently open the file, read it sequentially, and then re-open it
so that we can read it randomly, reading in the data for arbitrary
packets.

When capturing in "Update list of packets in real time" mode, as far as
I know we need to have the file open twice, so that the sequential pass
through the file won't get its file pointer moved out from under it if
the user clicks on some random packet to display it, unless there's some
way to avoid that.)