> Now that somebody (Mark) is fiddling around with time display issues in
> Tethereal,
If you're refering to Mark Atwood's mail, that mail doesn't indicate
that he's working on any Tethereal-specific issues, nor that he's
working on any existing display code, it suggests that he's working on a
new dissector.
> would it be unreasonable to request that the date be
> displayed along with the absolute time (as "advertised" in the docs), or
> make it optional?
It would be unreasonable to make Ethereal and Tethereal *always* display
the date as part of the time stamp, as that takes extra room on the
screen and, in a large number of cases, doesn't add useful information.
It would not be unreasonable to make it an *option* to display the date
as well as the time, either by adding "Date and time" column types that
can be chosen in the "Columns" tab of the "Preferences" dialog box, or
by adding a flag to the "Display Options" dialog box and additional
options for the "-t" command-line flag to control whether to display the
date as well as the time in the existing column types for time.
It would, however, be unwise to assume that this will necessarily be
implemented quickly (nobody's working full-time on Ethereal, so a
request for that feature will get thrown into the same pile as all the
other feature requests, and implemented when one of the developers gets
around to it; the developer base seems to be growing more slowly than
the user base, which means the pile in question will probably, over
time, have stuff added to it faster than stuff is removed from it by
being implemented).