Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] No license change for plugins: the other way

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From: "Ronnie Sahlberg" <ronnie_sahlberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 20:45:58 +1100
From: "Trauer Andreas"
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 8:20 PM
Subject: RE: [Ethereal-dev] No license change for plugins: the other way


> Hello,
>
>  this is such a long discussion and it probably won't find and end.

Correct, it will not.
It never did before it will not now. It gets some action going on the list
though.
Empirical evidence suggest the current license is here to stay since no one
is interested in
investing the resources and costs assosiated with changing it.

It would be nice if productive issues that moves ethereal forward could
generate this kind of
debates though. As in what design choices do we need to do now and why
should we to them in order
to make ethereal better.

>
>  So as Brad Hards had written before: Trying the other way might be
> easier. Let's define some kind of "external" protocol, maybe by sending
> messages through a pipe or whatsoever.

Who is going to develop this code?
It is a rather significant project and if two way communications are needed,
like if the proprietary
module needs to control functionality of the main ethereal code, latency
issues may well make performance suck.

Seriously,  Sniffer is an excellent tool. These problems do not exist with
that tool.
More than likely there would probably be a higher demand for these plugins
for Sniffer than for
ethereal anyway.
I do think the causal users would prefer Sniffer in about 100% of the cases
anyway since
IMHO ethereal unfortunately has a rather steep learning curve, like, IF you
learn display filters properly it rules, if you DONT learn display filters
well ...