Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal GUI

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 15:53:30 -0800

On Nov 17, 2003, at 5:44 AM, Ulf Lamping wrote:

Well, that would be nice to look at. But please keep in mind, that making different GUIs for different platforms will force people to maintain different frontends at once, even if they don't have that platform by hand. Currently, you will write code for the GTK, and it will work (hopefully) on all supported platforms. The risk of forking the GUI code seems to become a maintenance *nightmare* and could slow down development of new features a lot...

Gerald's scheme should handle a lot of that.

Some work on moving more of the GUI tap code into common code (e.g., something to let you register a tap that displays as a table might let you write such a tap without *any* GUI code - the Tethereal and Ethereal taps could perhaps even be the same, which would make it easier to have that tap be a plugin if we add support for plugins other than dissectors, and perhaps common graph-drawing code as well) might also help (in addition to making it easier to write taps).