Ethereal-dev: [ethereal-dev] Re: [ethereal-users] Ethereal Plugins

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From: Gilbert Ramirez <gram@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 08:26:54 -0500
On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 at 12:43:20AM -0500, Guy Harris wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

That brings up an interesting idea to think about for post-1.0 Ethereal.
What about distributing *all* dissectors as plugins, but with plugins
based on the dissector_table routines instead of the dfilter routines.
(It might be more work to provide top-level/link-layer dissectors
as plugins, but we could figure out a way.)

We could even group multiple dissectors into a single shared library,
so we'd have a "NetWare" plugin which decoded IPX, SPX, and NCP. Or
an IPv4 plugin which decoded ICMP, IPv4, TCP, and UDP.

What I'm thinking of is something like the Gimp or Apache, where a lot
of the functionality is in plugins.  The reason to do this would be for
the really large dissectors (SMB, NFS, and NCP when I finally finish
it). I may not have a lot of NCP traffic on my network, so I'd configure
Ethereal not to load that dissector. Once I need it (either detected by
Ethereal or decided by me), the proper plugin is loaded.

Just an idea,

--gilbert