Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal plugin versioning question

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From: Jaap Keuter <jaap.keuter@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 13:44:08 +0200 (CEST)
On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Guy Harris wrote:

> Filonenko Alexander-AAF013 wrote:
>
> > Protocol does not carry versioning info, so it is the user who has to make a
> > choice of what protocol version needed before Ethereal start.
>
> If you have a single dissector that dissects all versions, with a
> preference setting to specify which version, the user doesn't have to
> choose before starting Ethereal - they can change it while Ethereal is
> running.

Which would be nice if you have a unified source.... But than it would be
riddled with version selection logic, making it _very_ difficult to
maintain.

I'm in a similar situation as Alexander is. The protocol get changed, and
I can accomodate the change requests on the plugin very quickly, but older
captures may become unreadable.
It would be nice to have a system which used the version information in
the plugin to be able to select the desired version of the dissector.
This could be done in a similar way as enabling/disabling dissectors is
done. The defacto version numbering standard should make it easy to
select the latest vesion dissector by default.