Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Replace TRUE/FALSE with proper ENC_* in proto_tree_add_item(

From: Chris Maynard <Chris.Maynard@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:05:05 +0000 (UTC)
Anders Broman <a.broman@...> writes:

> > Should we use ENC_NA here too to prevent confusion?
> My preference is the opposite use ENC_BIG_ENDIAN as that is the 
> "natural" encoding for the
> protocol  and ENC_BIG_ENDIAN is less confusing in my opinion.

For what it's worth, I agree with Anders here.  I tend to think of the endian as
being associated more with the protocol than with each individual field, so I
would prefer a consistent BIG (or LITTLE as the case may be) endian used 
throughout.

I think this also has other potential advantages, e.g., if a multi-byte field is
incorrectly coded as a 1-byte field then later fixed, or if a single-byte field
is later expanded to a multi-byte field through a protocol update, the
endianness won't have to be changed from ENC_NA to ENC_[BIG|LITTLE]_ENDIAN.  And
of course, the fact that ENC_NA is the same as ENC_BIG_ENDIAN only introduces
more potential problems for little-endian protocols.

- Chris