Howdy,
as part of the discussion for several recent bugs and gerrit changes to add preference settings for various protocols to enable/disable heuristic dissection, Michael Mann suggested we just provide a way to enabled/disable *any* heuristic dissector (i.e., for all of them, automagically in code).
For example, by providing a similar thing as currently available for Protocols with the 'Analyze->Enabled Protocols' dialog. (well... available in Wireshark-GTK, not Qt yet)
That seems like a really good idea to me.
The only issue with it, other than having to inspect and possibly change ~200 files, is whether to remove the existing heuristic enable/disable preference settings for those protocols that provide one already. Doing so would break backwards-compatibility of existing preference files if the user had changed the default for a heuristic, and break any user script that starts Wireshark/tshark with the '-o’ command-line option to set a heuristic preference, and of course it would likely change the C-code dynamic plugin API (though that changes all the time).
On the other hand, we’d be doing this for version 2.0 so such changes are defendable. And keeping them would be very confusing. And we have removed preference settings in the past, though probably not in such a large number (~40 preference settings).
Does anyone object to such a change? Or have a different idea?
-hadriel