Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] [patch] capture dialog with simple histogram

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 16:50:45 -0800

On Oct 23, 2003, at 1:58 AM, Ulf Lamping wrote:

I have added a simple histogram output to the capture dialog (the dialog, when the capture is in progress).

Hopefully it doesn't get in the way of capturing by increasing the amount of work done to update the capture dialog. (Microsoft Network Monitor normally displays a lot of stuff when capturing, but it has an option wherein all it displays is a dialog box with a packet counter and a stop button - the packet counter shows the number of packets captured, and that's it. We might need something similar.)

In the past, I found it difficult to read the percentage values from this dialog, to get an idea what is going on on the net. When the capture file isn't very large, the percentage values are flickering a lot.

Is there any case where the percentage is useful? I.e., should the histogram *supplement* the percentage or *replace* it?

Example (progress bar emulated by ascii art for this mail):
Total  30  Histogram  100,0%
SCTP   20   ====--     66,6%
TCP    10   ==----     33,3%
UDP     0   ------      0,0%
...

In the total row (the first row), i have avoided the progress bar (and put the label "Histogram" instead),

It's not obvious what "Histogram" means - should it instead be labeled as "Percentage" or something such as that? ("100.0%" is also not all that interesting....)

I first tried to put the percentage value into this progress bar, but this looks ugly in GTK1 and increases the height of the dialog a lot, so I removed this again.

How is it in GTK2? If it's not so bad in GTK2 (i.e., doesn't increase the height of the dialog too much and isn't ugly), perhaps the GTK2 version could do that, with the GTK1 version working as it does now.