Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Capture dialog ringbuffer behaviour

[Laurent Deniel <laurent.deniel@xxxxxxx>]

Ulf Lamping wrote:
> What doc do you think of? The only doc I know of this is the user's 
> guide. 

And the manual page ?

> If I understand you correct, you want to have only one ring buffer file, 
> with unlimited number of switches to the next (the same file again, but 
> emptied out).
> What is the use of *one* ring buffer file? It will be overwritten at the 
> next file switch so your complete history get's lost at some point in time.

Right, and this is exactly what I want in some cases (i.e. *one* file which
is limited in size). But not so important than the "unlimited" case.

> > > This means that [t]ethereal is *never* stopped (well unless crashes or
> > > memory leaks ... ;-(
> That can easily be achieved by *not* setting the file(s) stop condition.

OK.

> > > The '0' in the GUI was only temporary since I wanted to have the core
> > > features in place very quickly and without spending then too much time
> > > in the GUI part ...
> I'm a bit angry about that. Being translated this would mean:
> "If anyone else cannot use or understand my GUI , that his own problem. 
> Should someone else may do the work of fixing the GUI."

No, this means that when I have the time (or when someone else cares) to
enhance it (and you care ;-). But remember that changing / beautifying things is
OK as long as you don't remove features used by end users for years.

> This is a pattern: Implementing some new feature, and putting it 
> "somehow" into the GUI, so all features can be accessed in a way.
> That's exactly (one of?) the reason why ethereal has a bad reputation 
> when it comes to usability.

One other is the lack of decent help / doc (or mismatch of real
implementation and doc ;-) ... and stability of GTK or Ethereal GUI code.

Laurent