[Biot Olivier <Olivier.Biot@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: [Ethereal-users] Packet error handling ideas, was: Ethereal 0.8.18 gdk_text_size error caused by corruptedTCP header

Hi all,

It would be very interesting to know which top level protocol is broken
in a buggy packet.  Error types should be defined too.  Examples:

- checksum error
- packet too short or too long
- framing / alignment error
- protocol error (e.g., unknown version)

All protocol dissectors should define a "protocol_name.error" entity,
which is 0x0000 if no errors occur in the packet.  Any error that
occurs on this packet should set a bit in this ".error" entity.
In this case, selecting packets with any or specific errors is quite
straightforward.

The user interface could be enhanced by optionally adding an error
column.  Nice option could be the shading of error packets.

Protocol dissection should stop at the 1st protocol layer with errors.
If possible, the user interface may try on demand decoding of selected
buggy packets.

Lots of ideas, now we have to implement this ;^)

Regards,

Olivier