Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] patches to add interface descriptions

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at 6:01 PM, Nathan Jennings wrote:

> Attached are patch files I've created with "cvs diff" against anon cvs
> as of yesterday morning. The patches add an optional interfaces 
> description string to the capture preferences dialog. The description 
> string looks like:
>
> eth0(eth0 descr),eth1(eth1 descr),...

So does this add the ability for the *user* to add a description, over 
and above whatever description the OS supplies, if any?

If so, then perhaps it should default that description to the one the 
OS supplies, and let the user override that, rather than having two 
descriptions on OSes where the OS supplies one (currently only Windows, 
but at some point libpcap might dig up descriptions on some UNIXes) - 
the OS description is often just a model name, and an explicit 
user-supplied description might render the OS description unnecessary 
(not that a model name is all that useful on a multi-homed machine with 
multiple interfaces of the same type anyway).

That might be simpler than having two description strings for 
interfaces.