Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] Unification of command line parameters for the sharks

From: Joerg Mayer <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2012 13:20:16 +0200
Hello List,

this is a request for comments.

I wanted to add half a dozen -d (decode as) options to wireshark and found
that this feature does only exist for tshark and that -d is used by something
else (initial display filter).
My first idea was do rename -d on wireshark to something else and copy the tshark
-d to wireshark. Then I didn't like the idea of copying code from tshark to
wireshark. I'm not a big fan of code duplication and the inconsistencies between
the command line options between the sharks is annoying.

What about having a shared command line parsing code for all the sharks?

Options fall into two categories:
- global options that are available to all the tools and
- gui options are specific to a particular gui. Gui options might
  be changed to -g<gui-specific-option-name> (or any other inconvenient
  letter). They would have the -g stripped and passed to a gui specific
  parser.

This would have the side effect of making all core features available to
all sharks (like: is there a reason why I can either have the summary line
in tshark or the detailed decoding but not both and the decode as).

Comments on this?
Which other inconsistencies are there?

Ciao
      Jörg

-- 
Joerg Mayer                                           <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx>
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that
works. Some say that should read Microsoft instead of technology.