On Sat, Apr 06, 2002 at 04:35:51PM -0600, George Sanderson wrote:
> At 04:59 PM 4/4/2002 -0800, you wrote:
> >On Thu, Apr 04, 2002 at 06:41:29PM -0600, George Sanderson wrote:
> What about suggestion number 1.
> 1) Place a one line header at the beginning of the print output that
> provides the program name, version, output format,
What about my response to suggestion number 1, namely that you need to
ask for more than the "output format" - you need to specify what "the
output format" *means*?
> and the date time of the capture.
>
> This could be used to differentiate future changes in the output format
> and provide a time reference if the time output only is in seconds.
If you want a time reference, set the time output format.
> >> 2) Add a column for the packet size.
> >>
> >> This would enable utilization (bytes/seconds) to be calculated.
> >
> >The summary output format is not fixed; it's specified by an item in the
> >configuration file.
> >
> This should probably be enabled by default, since it is one of the critical
> values that is needed to calculate packet statistics.
You are assuming here that the main reason for getting the summary
output is to do packet statistics.
That is an assumption for which I see no supporting evidence. I see no
reason to force those columns to appear by default, and require users
who don't want them to turn them off, rather than honoring users'
preferences.
> If it was available
> by default then utilization could normally be calculated by most (default)
> summary text output files. If it is not available by default, the
> likelihood of being able to calculate utilization from a summary text file
> output is remote.
Remote only if people refuse to reconfigure Ethereal/Tethereal to
produce text summaries with that output.
> This is good, but again, these should always be provided as numbers by
> default in addition to any resolved application port numbers provided.
See my previous comments about defaults.