Huge thanks to our Platinum Members Endace and LiveAction,
and our Silver Member Veeam, for supporting the Wireshark Foundation and project.

Wireshark-bugs: [Wireshark-bugs] [Bug 7222] Saving a file may discard comments

Date: Wed, 9 May 2012 14:03:49 -0700 (PDT)
https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=7222

--- Comment #4 from Martin Kaiser <wireshark@xxxxxxxxx> 2012-05-09 14:03:49 PDT ---
(In reply to comment #3)

> 
> The GIMP (as of version 2.8), handles it entirely differently. It
> differentiates between the actions "Save" and "Export", where "Save" is only
> the standard file format which is guaranteed to hold all the necessary data,
> and Export is for everything else.
> 
> ---
> 
> The GIMP's method seems sanest to me. Make "Save" (and "Save As") force the
> pcapng file format, and make "Export" handle everything else (including the
> Plaintext, CSV, etc. formats it currently does). It would make sense in this
> case to make "Export" launch a typical save-as style dialogue, and move all the
> current "Export" items (CSV, etc.) to the file-type drop-down in that dialogue.
> 

Hi Evan,

this sounds interesting to me.

My understanding is that wireshark has never aimed for supporting to write many
file formats (only for reading them). I guess pcapng would be sufficient for
everything people would ever want in a capture file.

I've played a bit with the approach you outlined, see my attached patch. I only
changed the linux code, not the win32 parts.
"Save As" would be obsolete (i.e. the same as Save) if we only ever save as
pcapng.

My gut feeling is that the underlying issue must be addressed somehow before
1.8. People will try the comments and will be annoyed when they're discarded
without any warning.

I assume the gimp-like approach is too significant a change to get accepted
quickly. 

@core-developers:
Could we have a comment about the best way forward?
I'd like to come up with a solution that's acceptable before 1.8

Best regards,

   Martin

-- 
Configure bugmail: https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are watching all bug changes.