Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Reaction of g_assert maybe too hard for buggy dissectors?

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ulf Lamping wrote:

> This comes to the following: why don't we check for such things and fire 
> an exception, so a [Malformed packet] will be displayed.

Because the packet might not be malformed; it might just be that the 
*dissector* is malformed.

Insead, the checks (which should be done in *all* versions, even 
production versions) should probably throw a new exception, which

	1) causes something such as "[Dissector bug]", perhaps with an 
assertion string containing the file/line and assertion expression, as 
well as the protocol name, so we know what protocol was being dissected;

	2) call "report_failure()", so that a dialog box is popped up in 
Ethereal and a message is printed in Tethereal, so that the user knows 
that there's something wrong and is thus more likely to tell us about it.