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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Howto unregister a dissector?

From: "Martin Peylo" <martinmeis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:27:57 +0200
Hi,

> I'm searching for a way to unregister a dissector.

I don't think there is a way.  See below.

I was looking around in the code and I think it might be easy to
unregister a dissector or rather replace one when registering another
one with the same name. For sure consciously unregistering would avoid
doing it by mistake.

I have less overview over the coherences in the complete code than
most of you, so my question is - just to satisfy my curiosity - if
there are any design concerns against the attached patch? This is just
a code example, I didn't test it so far and I don't expect it to be
applied!

This might provide the opportunity to replace an inbuilt dissector
with a plugin which would make the plugins more powerful.

I am arware of the fact that this might lead people not to give
patches on inbuilt protocols upstream since it would make it a lot
easier to use private dissectors whenever there is a new version of
Wireshark. But on the other hand it would also make it a lot easier
for users to use hacked versions of inbuilt dissectors on several
computers where the hack mustn't go into the official version. This
could be if there are license problems (e.g. using an external library
for decoding) or if the hack is very userspecific and against the
interest of other users.

Best regards,
Martin

Attachment: wireshark-unregister-example.patch.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data