Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] tapping usability

["Guy Harris" <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

bujecas@xxxxxx said:
> I'm a little bit confused about tapping development ...
> For what purpose tapping was designed?

Allowing pieces of Ethereal other than packet dissectors to get called,
after a packet is dissected, with information about that packet or about
particular protocol layers in that packet.

That's a bit of a vague description - but that's because there wasn't a
single narrow purpose for which the tap mechanism was designed; it was
*intended* to be general.

For example, with the taps that currently come with Ethereal, we have:

    taps that give statistics for particular protocols;

    taps that give general traffic statistics;

    taps that get information about RTP sessions, including the payload in
the session.