I've been thinking about this problem a bit myself. I've been eyeing
the SDP dissector because while it does a marvelous job of dissecting
SDP, it leaves something to be desired in the available set
of tags on which you can filter. If I were to want to take SDP the
same route and try to pluginize it I would need some way
for all of the places that call SDP (including my MGCP plugin) to figure
out how to use a plugin version of it, and more importantly, how to
cope with its absence (since one should be able to gracefully handle
the absence of any given plugin).
I'm still new enough to the root architecture of ethereal that I don't
really know if the above idea is viable or not, nor to I have any notion
what a good way to implement it would be.
I don't know if a pluginized H323 calling a pluginized Q.931 would
satisfy the license gods, but it is at least an interesting thought.
While I would far prefer to see a GPL based H323 dissector I do understand
the pain that writing it entails. I also understand the incredible
utility of being able to dissect H.323 if you work in that field.
I know my brother would KILL (probably several times over) for
an H.323 ethereal dissector.
But let us not reflame the license wars. I think this horse has already
been beaten to death previously on this list.
Ed
On Thu, 9 Nov 2000 andreas.sikkema@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > 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'd love to do this with the H.323 stuff, but because part of the protocl
> is Q.931 based I can't.... Well, I could put my own Q.931 dissector in
> the plug-in, but that's a road I don't want to follow.
>
> If only you could call an Ethereal basic function which returns the address
> of the protocol dissector from a plugin, f.i.:
> dissector_q931 = get_dissector_address("Q.931");
>
> But apart from that, I think I still would have problems linking the plugin....
>
> --
> Andreas Sikkema
> andreas.sikkema@xxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
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