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Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] ethereal.conf vs. preferences

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 01:13:03 +0100
Graeme Hewson wrote:

The User's Guide and the About dialog say the global settings file is called "preferences", but the ethereal and tethereal man pages say it's called "ethereal.conf"; the man pages are correct.

That's explained easily, as I've written both the User's Guide and the About dialog, but not the man pages. I was assuming that there are differences between unix and windows, as I didn't had a reference at hand (or at least didn't thought about the manpage) while writing these documentation, and I've never used the "ethereal.conf" file at all.

Is there a reason that different names are used for these two files? I know this schema as the global/local/command line preferences from other programs and I think it's quite powerful and easy to understand. However, I'd expected to have the global and local files have the same name. Is this a usual behvaiour that these two filenames differ?

I've fixed the "User's Guide" the way it currently is.

Also, there's inconsistency within and between these documents about the other global and personal configuration files. The User's Guide doesn't mention the global directory for Unix (equivalent to %ETHEREAL% on Windows) for all files. The man pages give various directories for this (/etc or /usr/local/etc).

Same reason, I'm almost only working on Windows so I don't know much about the various unix versions and just didn't had the knowledge to add that info. The former User's Guide didn't gave any information about it, so I had to do some "guesswork".

Well, at the time writing the User's Guide I was asking for a review, but didn't got lot's of comments. So we can change it now to the better (about a year later ;-)

I would like to get the description as accurate as possible, but got a little bit lack of knowledge, so you might be able to help me here. I've put an updated "User's Guide" at the wiki, at http://wiki.ethereal.com/Development
so please comment...

Regards, ULFL