Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] RFC: add support for multiple open captures

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 06:08:52PM +0100, Biot Olivier wrote:
> As I understood from some mails on the list, some people are looking for
> development work :) I think one big accomplishment would be to support
> multiple open captures. This will require a rethink of the global variables
> used throughout the code. (maybe we want a file declaring all global
> variables for *any* Ethereal UI, or say the Ethereal core).

"Rethink" meaning "replacement with per-file variables", in many cases,
such as the various hash tables used to maintain stuff such as
request/response matches, as well as protocol preferences - if somebody
has more than one file open, they won't necessarily want the same
protocol preference settings for both captures.

> Looks useful?

Possibly useful on desktop environments other than native Mac OS X,
although you could run more than one instance of Ethereal - which you
might have to if you have multiple *large* captures and a 32-bit version
of Ethereal, as you might run out of address space.

Probably *necessary* for a native Mac OS X version, as OS X's
application model has one process handling *all* documents of a given
type - you don't have more than one instance of TextEdit or Preview or
Microsoft {Word,Excel,etc.} open if you have more than one file open.

> Looks feasible?

It's probably ultimately feasible, but I suspect it's a *lot* of work.