Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] RFD: Creating subdirectories in epan/dissectors/

From: Ed Beroset <beroset@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2012 20:29:32 -0400
Evan Huus wrote:
On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 1:46 PM, Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Unwieldy how?  Except for having to know not to do "vi
epan/dissectors/<tab><tab>" (for fear of too many pages of output) I don't
find the directory unwieldy.

That's part of it - I still do that accidentally on occasion. The
other part of it is just that the number of files is overwhelming.
It's not necessarily inefficient for the computer, but it is certainly
inefficient for a mental model of the source structure, and it feels
daunting, which is something we want to avoid in order to encourage
new developers. I know when I checked out the source tree for the very
first time I looked at the size of it and had very much a "where do I
start?!" moment.

I'm relatively new to Wireshark development (only a few years), so I remember that moment too. However, I'm not sure that organizing things into subdirectories would really help that much. What you've identified though, is a real thing that might be addressed, which is that regardless of how the files are physically organized, it would be useful to structure things to aid human beings who look at and work with the source files. Doxygen, which is already lightly supported, could help there without a lot of additional effort. I think that might be a better way to approach this problem than rearranging the source code directory structure. What do you think?

Ed