Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Signal handler during dissection

[Devin Heitmueller <dheitmueller@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

How often do people run into issues where they are using Ethereal to do
a capture, and upon hitting "stop", Ethereal crashes during dissection?

What if we were to modify the signal handler such that if SIGSEGV occurs
during dissection, we prompt the user with the option to save the
capture?  

Here's my concern.  I've had numerous cases where I was doing a capture
on a busy network, and SOMETHING in the capture didn't dissect when I
stopped the capture (resulting in a segfault).  Of course, if I were to
do the capture again, I'm not likely to see the offending packet.  Hence
I don't have a capture I can send to the mailing list (or debug myself,
as the case may be).

Does this idea of a custom signal handler have any merit?  Just
something simple that asks the user if they want to save the capture,
and if they click "yes", it writes the capture back to disk and exits.  

Thanks,

-- 
Devin Heitmueller
Senior Software Engineer
Netilla Networks Inc.