----- Original Message ----- From: "Ronnie Sahlberg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Andrew Feren" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Kevin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 10:01 AM Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Re: Ethereal Gripe
> A tool might be useful to produce a better-than-nothing first-shot dissector > for ethereal. Sure and if you'll pardon my continual use of an analogy from a different domain I would say this is the moral equivalent of a MIB browser. MIB browsers spray information at you with only as much order as can be gleaned from the MIB. It isn't much, but it is a thousand times better than nothing until you can get something better. I think the same is true of protocols. Getting Ethereal to automatically generate code to at least label fields and interpret types correctly would be way better than the alternative of looking at the raw hex dump. Doing this without recompiling would be great, but not necessary. > When the dissector matures and gets state tracking and intelligence added to > it, the problem space is just shifted from the dissector to the > compiler/generator. I agree, but I also think that this does not preclude autogenerating packet decoding. [ snip a good example of what an NFS dissector should do ] > I am absolutely convinced that it is more difficult and requires more effort > to develop a protocol description language that is rich enough > to describe these relations htat i described than to code these relations by > hand. I agree! I don't think we should even try. I think we should forget about autogenerating dissection and consider autogenerating good packet decoding (to be used by dissectors). -Andrew
