Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Desegment/Reassemble: What's the real difference?

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From: "Guy Harris" <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 12:56:31 -0700 (PDT)
Ulf Lamping said:
> Is there a good reason to distinguish between both,

Probably not.  Some protocols call the pieces of packets "fragments",
others call them "segments".  Calling the operation "reassembly" avoids
having to worry about whether the pieces are "fragments" or "segments"
or....

> or would it be a
> good idea to find one word for this mechanism and use it anywhere (or at
> least in the GUI related parts, like the name of the preference setting
> as displayed in the preferences dialog).

I'd vote for "reassemble" and "reassembly".  The protocols could say
"Reassemble segmented packets" or "Reassemble fragmented packets" or
whatever, but they should probably all say "Reassemble", unless, for a
*particular* protocol, nobody familiar with that protocol would think of
it as "reassembly" and everybody familiar with that protocol would think
of it as "desegmentation".