Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Decoding packets while writing to file with tethereal

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From: Joerg Mayer <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 21:59:03 +0200
On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 12:43:50PM -0700, Guy Harris wrote:
> > I'd prefer something like the following, because the behaviour of
> > printing a packet is not influenced by whether it is being written to file.
> > 
> > none		capture and decode to stdout
> > -w file		capture to file and decode to stdout
> > -q -w file	capture to file, print number of packets to stderr
> 
> Unfortunately, those change the behavior even when you're not using
> "-Q"; people might expect "-w" not to decode to stdout, and might expect
> "-q" with "-w" not to write anything to stdout, and might even have
> scripts that assume that.

That's why my patch didn't do it "right" from the beginning: I know that
others may look diffently at this than I do. On the other hand, just
because it has been done wrong in the past doesn't mean it has to be
done that way in the future :-) Maybe I should have asked the real
question that was only implied: Does anyone really mind changing that
behaviour? If so, how much? Does anyone else don't like the way the
options work right now?

The idea to use -Q was just because -q already affected the quietness,
which was what the new options does too. I interpreted -Q to mean "not
quiet", but that's mnemonics. I don't mind changing it to -S if you
prefer that, but my real hope is still that a sufficient amount of
people are in favour of changeing the command line options to someting
more orthogonal some time in the future.

So, I think I should just check in my current patch and leave a possible
incompatible version for some future version (if it's done at all,
maybe with a 0.10.0 release or so).
Just one last question: -Q or -S?

 Ciao
     Jörg

--
Joerg Mayer                                          <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx>
I found out that "pro" means "instead of" (as in proconsul). Now I know
what proactive means.