The problem is that the preferences do not take effect until Ethereal
is
restarted. I went to the preferences window, and then to Capture.
I checked "Update list of packets in real time". The buttons on the
bottom are a bit confusing, so I clicked Apply, Save, then Ok. Surely
this would save (in a file), and apply immediately.
However, when I went to start a capture, "Update list of packets in
real
time" was not checked. When I restarted Ethereal, it was checked.
So it seems like Apply/Ok is not working properly here.
Also, why do we need Apply and Ok and Save? It seems like at least one
if not two of those could be eliminated.
(This is a generic Ethereal issue, not Debian-specific at all, so it
should probably be discussed on one of the Ethereal lists, rather than
in the Debian bug.)
The underlying problems are that:
the Preferences dialog includes both
1) "global" preference settings that would apply regardless of the
capture you're looking at
and
2) protocol preferences that might be global or might be per-capture;
there are preference settings that could be applied as soon as the
preference is changed (because they're quick to apply) and those that
should require an "Apply" button (because they're not quick to apply -
such as the protocol preferences, which require a complete
redissection).
Global preferences might as well be saved as soon as they're accepted,
but the preference settings probably shouldn't be.
It might be that:
the protocol preferences should be moved to another dialog;
the remaining preferences should be applied, and saved, as soon as
they're changed.
We might also want to move the non-protocol preferences to the "recent"
file, so that we can update those without saving the current protocol
preferences state. (We should still support reading those settings
from the "preferences" file, so that they're not lost - but updates
should be written to the "recent" file, and values in that file should
override values in the "preferences" file.)
