Good question. Part of the reason that I wrote this plugin is that I
have a need to use ethereal in a production environment in which it
would be adventageus to be able to dissect MGCP. I really want to
as much as possible keep this production environment running the latest
actual RELEASE of ethereal. It may happen in the course of events that
I need to make some changes to the MGCP dissector to enhance its
functionality. The rev time to the next release of ethereal may
take a while. As a plugin I can simply drop my MGCP plugin into any
install of ethereal which is recent enough to supply the services I use.
If I screwed up I can just revert the plugin.
In summary I guess you could say I wrote the MGCP dissector as a plugin
because it increases the isolation of the MGCP dissector from ethereal.
I see this as a good thing. I was always taught that your modules should
be as weakly bound to each other as you can manage. This is just a
weakening of that bind. Increased modularity is good.
I believe your point about plugins needing to be installed to work
is correct, but once I put up a build/root dir and make installed
ethereal into it I actually found it was quicker to make install
in the ethereal/plugin/mgcp dir than it had previously been to
go through the whole static linking process for a dissector.
In general my personal bias would be towards more plugins, not less. For
the reasons I outlined above. If you don't think any of the above are
valid or if you can think of any other drawbacks to plugins please let
me know, I am quite curious.
Ed
On Thu, 9 Nov 2000, Guy Harris wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 08, 2000 at 10:45:47PM -0500, Ed Warnicke wrote:
> > OK. Here is the correction to that problem as well as several others
> > plus a bit of cleanup . Please check this out and then check it in if it
> > looks good to you.
>
> Just out of curiosity, why a plugin? I think plugins have to be
> installed in order for Ethereal to use them - you can't just build
> Ethereal and run it from the directory in which you built it.
>
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