Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] use g_hook mechanism in file.c, instead of directly calling menu, statusbar and a

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ulf Lamping wrote:

> While looking at the file.c, I repeatedly ask myself two question:
>
> 1.) why do we have separate code for Ethereal and Tethereal for file and 
> capturing things?

Because Tethereal doesn't need to open the file in "random access 
supported" mode (at some point, with a buffering mechanism to let us do 
seeks within the portion of the file data that's in the buffer, we might 
support non-random-access opens on pipes, so you could pipe a capture 
file to Tethereal; random access to a pipe is a bit difficult :-)), and 
doesn't need to maintain the linked list of frame_data structures.

Perhaps some of the file.c stuff could be common between Ethereal and 
Tethereal, but most of it is Ethereal-specific (a number of routines to 
do sequential scanning through packets in a file that's been read in - 
but Tethereal doesn't "read in" a file, it just reads packets from the 
file without remembering anything about them other than what's 
remembered by dissectors).