Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] RFD: Creating subdirectories in epan/dissectors/

[Ed Beroset <beroset@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Evan Huus wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 1:46 PM, Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > Unwieldy how?  Except for having to know not to do "vi
> > epan/dissectors/<tab><tab>" (for fear of too many pages of output) I don't
> > find the directory unwieldy.
>
> That's part of it - I still do that accidentally on occasion. The
> other part of it is just that the number of files is overwhelming.
> It's not necessarily inefficient for the computer, but it is certainly
> inefficient for a mental model of the source structure, and it feels
> daunting, which is something we want to avoid in order to encourage
> new developers. I know when I checked out the source tree for the very
> first time I looked at the size of it and had very much a "where do I
> start?!" moment.

I'm relatively new to Wireshark development (only a few years), so I 
remember that moment too.  However, I'm not sure that organizing things 
into subdirectories would really help that much.  What you've identified 
though, is a real thing that might be addressed, which is that 
regardless of how the files are physically organized, it would be useful 
to structure things to aid human beings who look at and work with the 
source files.  Doxygen, which is already lightly supported, could help 
there without a lot of additional effort.  I think that might be a 
better way to approach this problem than rearranging the source code 
directory structure.  What do you think?

Ed