Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] HTTP chunked encoding and protocol hierarchy

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From: Jerry Talkington <jtalkington@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 14:10:58 -0700
On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 10:36:03PM +0200, Olivier Biot wrote:
> From: Jerry Talkington
> 
> | The more I think about this/look at the code, the less I like this
> idea.
> | There doesn't really seem to be a way to add media types to the
> protocol
> | hierachy without creating a dissector for each one encountered.
> 
> Consider the fact that there is already a WBXML dissector, a GIF
> dissector and a JPEG/JFIF dissector. Then there is also the
> "line-based text" dissector. And there are more.
> 
> The way it is now makes much sense to me.

Sure, but 99% of the traces that I look at have at least one object type
that doesn't have a dissector.  I was just pontificating that it would
be useful to have the number of objects of X media type in the hierarchy
except...
 
> | I have a couple ideas for a generic dissector (i.e. you pass the
> name
> | and desciption, and a data dissector is created on the fly,) but I'm
> not
> | sure how worthwhile it would be, I'll have to do some more
> | investigation.
> 
> This is not really required, I think. There are much more important
> flaws in the protocol hierarchy code today as there is no means today
> of distinguishing between protoX on top of protoX or just an
> encapsulation of multiple protoX messages. This is easy to see with
> many X11 captures where concatenation of X11 messages in one packet
> are very common. The protocol hierarchy will show this as being X11
> over X11 over ... over X11.
> 
> Believe me, there is no simple means of deciding whether once it is
> encapsulation and the other time it is fragmentation or tunnelling.

this.  I was also thinking that I might just work on getting some
more/better HTTP statistics going.   But, there are other things that I
want to work on first (mainly decompression of HTTP entity-bodies.)

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