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

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From: "Ulf Lamping" <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 09:08:56 +0100
Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> schrieb am 28.10.03 01:50:48:
> 
> 
> 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.)
> 

Well, of course this will increase the amount of work to do while capturing a bit. As I'm usually working in low traffic networks doing protocol implementation debugging, I didn't have a problem with this, but others might have. Adding an option of that kind should be possible. 

> > 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?
> 

If you ask me this way, I think a replacement would be ok here (by simply removing the percentage values and only keep the "progress bars").

> > 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....)

Hmmm, if we would drop the percentage column completely, the 100.0% "problem" would be solved automatically ;-)
I would have no problem calling the progress bar row "Percentage", as I don't know a better english word for this.

> 
> > 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.
> 

The main problem in GTK2 with the percentage values is, that it makes the window a *lot* higher. Again, this would be solved, when the percentage values would be removed completely.

Regards, ULFL
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