Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] a question about discontinuous tvbuffs

[Ed Warnicke <hagbard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am aware that it is possible to construct a tvbuff that is composed
of discontinuous subsections of the backing tvbuff ( yeah tvbuff! ).

My question is this:

How well do the byte selections in the data pane of ethereal deal 
with this?  If I highlight a field in the dissection pane should I expect 
the discontinous sections of the data to be highlighted in the data
pane?  What about if I click on a byte in the data frame, will the 
inverse mapping work properly?  What if the mapping from data in a 
packet back to fields isn't one-to-one?  

In the process of tvbuffing the dns dissector I'm looking at setting 
up tvbuffs for dns names that are backed by discontinous sections 
of the backing tvbuff.  This is to handle DNS message compression 
as described in RFC 1035, section 4.1.4, page 30.  

The problem is that a given section of the dns message may be 
part of multiple DNS names, and therefore multiple RR via this 
compression.  Thus the lack of one-to-one-ness.  

I don't see any real problem with this from a dissector or tvbuff 
perspective, I was just wondering if some of the ethereal gui functions 
could handle it.  

Ed