Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] new release? version 1.0/wishlist

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday, August 29, 2003, at 6:03 AM, Jason House wrote:

>   * The ability for all tethereal taps to be available in ethereal
>     automatically.  This possibly could be achieved through
>     defining some kind of table that can be reinterpreted as either
>     a GUI window or an aligned text output to stdout (or a file)

YES.  That would also simplify the writing of taps (you don't have to 
write your own GUI code for Ethereal or your own output-formatting code 
for Tethereal), means that fixes or enhancements to the GUI code 
automatically apply to all taps using that mechanism, means that those 
taps could work with multiple UIs for Ethereal - and potentially could 
allow the data to be displayed as a table *or* as a drawing of some 
sort (chart, graph, etc.).

Once that's done, it'd make it easier to have taps as plugins, as you'd 
need only a plugin, with no UI code.

(We'd probably want to come up with some way for the UI code to attach 
to the tap, somehow, e.g. have a separate UI plugin, *not* loaded by 
Tethereal, that could request that it be called if a row in the table 
is selected, or double-clicked, or if a context menu is requested on 
it.)