(OK, let's try this again, putting a body in the mail message.)
> There needs to be a better way to be able to indicate errors,
> perhaps some kind of scale. (CRITICAL, ALERT, WARNING, etc)
So instead of "error" being a Boolean, it'd be an enumerated type, with
the values being levels. That does run the risk that the dissector
author's notion of the severity of the error wouldn't necessarily match
the user's notion of it, so a filter of
error == "Critical"
wouldn't necessarily {show the packets, color the packets, find the
packets} that the user would consider as having critical errors.
Having "error" enumerate the *types* of errors is unlikely to work at
all, as that requires the Ethereal core to anticipate the choices of
current and future protocol designers, unless there were a mechanism by
which you could have an enumerated type whose members were generated at
run time, rather than by a compile-time "value_string" array. Then
dissectors could register new error types.
Such a mechanism might be useful for other reasons.
The problem I have with that is that I suspect that
most users would mainly want to see only which packets have
errors, not which ones have errors of a specific type or
severity;
the more different severity levels or types there are, the more
likely that users would find it impossible to select which
severity level or error type to look for.
> So, that's why I drifted naturally to colors . . .
I'm not sure there was anywhere to drift, given that we were there
already; in the message to which you replied, I said:
This would not only allow us to optionally mark them in some
fashion (I'd go for allowing the user to specify the foreground
and background color for them),
