Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Enable extcap by default or not
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From: Dario Lombardo <dario.lombardo.ml@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2016 09:28:26 +0200
Even if I am not strong on that, I'd vote for enable by default. I admin that some of them are specific (like ciscodump or androiddump), but I consider others like sshdump and randpktdump pretty general. Having them hidden by default would limit their use. New users will never notice this new interfaces unless they careful read the release notes (and the average users don't). I guess that many people do remote sniffing on ssh connected machine and they will have great advantage by sshdump. We make software that should reach the users, don't we? What if it's hidden?
At the same time I must admin the list of extcap can became annoying long. For that reason some time ago I filed a enhancement on bugzilla to change the list into a dropdown menu.


From my perspective, this kind of enhancement would make the discussion and the preference itself obsolete. The extcaps would be enabled and shipped by default, but the look of the GUI wouldn't be cluttered.
Dario.

On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 7:42 AM, Roland Knall <rknall@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello List

There is currently a discussion going on in https://code.wireshark.org/review/#/c/17498 in regard to enabling extcap features by default or not.

There are basically two sides to the argument:

Cons - extcap interfaces are advanced features, which will not be used by a majority of users. As more and more of those interfaces emerge, it clutters up the list. Therefore disabling them by default and enabling them when needed is ok. 

Pros - There are users out there, who use Wireshark solely together with extcap interfaces. Lots of those users are not very familiar with Wireshark in general. extcap was intended to bring capture device support to Wireshark where otherwise it would not be present or very complicated to do so. For those users to enable the support before using it seems like an unnecessary hassle.

I just wanted to get the meaning of the list, on how we should proceed here, and if three are other arguments for or against enabling extcap by default.

To clarify, I am a Pro guy as I fear 3rd party users will not understand this and this will lead to support cases which will generate the opinion "Wireshark is overly complicated, let's use something else".

regards
Roland

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