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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Patch for Bug771, link layer header type selection

From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2006 23:56:47 +0100
Guy Harris wrote:
Florent.Drouin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Here is a patch for Bug 771 (repost).
It solves the problem of datalink header selection, when the interface has
more than one.
And now, when we reopen the dialog window, the datalink submenu is restored
to the last used value.

It appears that the last used value is global; should it be global, or should it be per-adapter?
Per adapter sounds reasonable (although I'm not an expert on this).

But how do you do this per adapter - adapters can appear dynamically - and internally we only work with one adapter AFAIK.
In addition, should it be saved in the "recent" file, so that it persists across Wireshark sessions?

Or, at least if it's per-adapter, should it be saved in, for example, a per-host "recent" file, so that if you have a home directory on a file server, which you use with multiple machines, the last used value for "en0" or "eth0" or... on one machine is used on that machine but not on other machines?
Hmmm, the interface name itself (and some other things) are saved in the preferences file.

So saving the link type in the recent file sounds odd to me.

I'm voting for moving the interface name (and some other settings) to the recent file for some time now, but there are people not being happy with this ;-)

There are other parameters in the capture options dialog which are worth to be saved in the recent (or preferences) file - the buffer size setting is already in the wishlist.

We should get a general direction about the whole topic - I guess this is more a "political" than a development problem ...

However, having some settings in the preferences and others in the recent file - appearing for the same capture options dialog - seems very user unfriendly to me.

Regards, ULFL