Ethereal-dev: Re: [tcpdump-workers] Re: [Ethereal-dev] Private DLT_s and WTAP_ENCAP_s

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 18:36:55 -0800
On Dec 19, 2003, at 5:19 PM, Guy Harris wrote:

As long as it's made clear that there won't ever be any code in tcpdump.org tcpdump or libpcap, ethereal.com Ethereal, etc. to support any particular interpretations of those reserved values (i.e., anybody who uses that stuff privately will have to maintain it indefinitely, and if they use it in a product, there won't ever be any support in official releases for reading capture files with those link-layer types), I think it'd be reasonable to have private DLT_ values.
I've added DLT_USER0 through DLT_USER15 to pcap-bpf.h in the 0.8 and 
main branches, along with a comment indicating how they should - and 
should not - be used.  Hopefully that'll keep vendors of 
firewall/intrusion detection/traffic logging/etc. appliances, and the 
like, from shipping products that use those values (the comment 
specifically says that developers of software that reads libpcap-format 
captures, e.g. tcpdump and Ethereal, aren't necessarily going to accept 
patches to allow those files to be read).