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

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From: Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 19:36:58 -0600 (CST)
On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Erwin Rol wrote:

> On Tue, 2003-11-18 at 00:37, Guy Harris wrote:
> > On Nov 17, 2003, at 3:30 PM, Erwin Rol wrote:
> > 
> > > Do i understand right that you wrote a Python program that generates
> > > WIN32-SDK code ? If so than it sounds like the work of maintaining two
> > > or more GUI's moved to maintaining two of more GUI-code generators (one
> > > for WIN32, one for GTK, etc. ).
> > 
> > Yes, but presumably you don't have to change the GUI code generator 
> > every time you change the Ethereal UI, so there's presumably *less* 
> > work involved in maintaining the GUI code generators.
> 
> true, but you still have to have different "XUL templates" for different
> OSes, since people will want other short cut keys etc.

Most likely.  However, even if we have a separate set of templates for
each platform, it's _still_ easier to change shortcuts and window layouts
by editing template files than it is to edit the source code directly.

> Another thing that just comes to my mind is special purpose network
> monitors. For example someone might be able to write a special protocol
> grapher for a certain protocol that won't be very usefull for others and
> will just add bloat to Ethereal. When he could write a small GUI and
> just use that as frontend that would be very nice. A bit like how the
> mozilla render engine is used by different programs to do HTML
> rendering. 

Sort of like editcap and mergecap in the current distribution?  I hadn't
thought of that, but it would be useful.