Ethereal Developers,
I'm working on a server application that makes use of several protocols,
some of which change rapidly. These protocols are encapsulated in a wide
variety of existing Open Source projects, such as GAIM, icqlib, Ethereal,
and so forth. It seems a shame that there is such duplication of effort and
it seemed to me that a great long-term direction would be to have a central
repository containing structured descriptions of all protocols that would be
maintained in common and then used by many different codebases using many
different languages.
This way, when Yahoo! messenger's protocol changes, all Open Source software
that uses the protocol could be updated in one fell swoop. Ideally, effort
would be made in designing this metaformat to make adding and maintaining
protocol descriptions easy.
I've seen this discussed in passing on the Ethereal-dev list a few times,
with mention of the benefits that could be provided (such as revising
formats on-the-fly without need for a full recompile or even a compile
environment). It seems the right way to do things, long-term.
Is this the right place to discuss such a possible eventuality? Do you folks
agree that that's the right direction in which to be headed?
Sincerely,
David Weekly