Joerg Mayer wrote:
Hello List,
as we are receiving the same questions time and again I have two feature
requests (or maybe three ;) to make Ethereal more support friendly ....
1) Get the FAQ back into the help menu
2) Get the start screen back and display the contents of the (unfolded)
help menu there.
3) Whenever someone selects a wireless interface on Win, display a
requester showing or pointing to the corresponding FAQ items.
Ciao
Joerg
Hi Joerg!
As I understand your intentions, I guess that it won't work that way
pretty well especially for Windows users who are expecting some sort of
"guidance" if a problem occurs. And this audience is causing most of the
"noise" in the lists, so addressing the problems directly seems reasonable.
I agree that there is something to do before the 1.0 release on that
topic, and I'm currently working on providing the user's guide as the
"online help", which is a first step IMO.
Let me explain, why your suggestions are good but not enough IMHO:
1) Simply showing the FAQ in it's current text form won't be working
well IMHO (maybe better than nothing but not more). It's an unnecessary
mix of Unix and Windows things.Some things are unlogical (why do point
2.1 appear under "download"?!?). It's a problem someone experience while
*installation* appears (it's caused by the download but that's obviously
not obvious at the moment the problem appears :-). Ok, for me and you
the problem *is* obvious, but that's a different story, too long to be
told here ...
I don't know if showing the FAQ will help a lot as most windows users
(even experienced ones) might never even heard about an FAQ)!
If we want to show the FAQ, we shouldn't use ASCII text for it, as this
just won't work!
2) Agreed. Maybe not simply the contents of the help menu (the list of
supported protocols might not be really helpful in most cases). The
general help topics and some "hot topics" depending on the OS might be a
lot more interesting. On a Win32 system, a topic "Problems with Wireless
Capturing?" might be much more helpful. This could be a link to a (new?)
section in the user's guide or to the Wiki.
3) That would be just very annoying for most users (including me). I was
thinking of this too, but didn't found a good trade off between annoying
boxes and a useful feature for newbies.
I would think that at least for some problems a more "active/detective"
approach will show much better results. For example the frequent problem
with TCP checksum offloading and checksum errors could be automatically
detected be the dissector. For example, if more than 0.1% of packets
contain a checksum error (or whatever a reasonable value might be) a
dialog box appears:
"There are a lot checksum errors in your capture. This is probably
caused by checksum offloading. See XXX for details about this mechanism
(O - don't show this message again)."
The dissector could simply count the checksum errors, and the GTK part
could ask the dissector after completely loading the file/finished the
capture.
This way, the problem will be detected "where caused", instead of: "if
you have any problems, read all the documentation we have as this may
solve your problem.". This is much more likely to help the user. It's
like the help text in the dialog box "no packets captured" which seems
to resolved *a lot* of frequently asked questions at the point where
they appear. I can remember that there was a *huge* number of questions
regarding this situation.
So in the end, I agree 100% that the current situation is unsatisfactory
and *must* be fixed before the 1.0 release. However, I would think that
some relative easy extensions can help solving the current situation a
lot more efficient than just simply adding a lot of pointers to the help
documentation.
Regards, ULFL
