Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] [RFC 2nd try] specially mark protocol fields "generated" by E

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 1 May 2004 15:00:43 -0700
On Sat, May 01, 2004 at 05:19:16PM +0200, Ulf Lamping wrote:
> Instead of putting this additional  field information into the 
> hf_register_info data at protocol registry (which is too inflexible), 
> this info should be stored in the field_info while adding the the items 
> to the proto_tree, just replacing the current visible field (currently 
> used as a single flag only :-).

That sounds reasonable - although it might still be useful to allow a
registered field to have a "default" set of field values, so that you'd
only need to set the flags if the value wasn't the default.

If we add that as an additional field to the header_field_info
structure, that means changing most dissectors to add the field - that
can probably be done with a script, but it's still a big change - and
changing scripts that mechanically generate header_field_info tables.

However, as the default value of the vast majority of fields is probably
0 (i.e., no flags set), it might not be worth adding that capability.

> This flag field could also keep other field specific information, like a 
> more general way of marking bad packets (e.g. when a checksum failed).

Yes, that'd be useful as well.