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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Infrastructure for plugins (including Lua-based ones) to add

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2012 15:00:00 -0700
On Jul 12, 2012, at 6:36 AM, Richard Sharpe wrote:

> My thought here is that after you have installed a few plugins, you
> will have to hunt around for which menu they have installed themselves
> in.

Only if the plugin author did a bad job of putting them into the menu tree in the first place.  If, for example, your plugin adds a new tap for analyzing HTTP, it won't be hard to find if you put it under Statistics -> HTTP, along with the existing HTTP statistics.  If it adds a new tap for analyzing some protocol that doesn't already have an entry in the Statistics menu, it should probably go (probably in alphabetical order) in the section of the Statistics menu for those sorts of menus (currently the bottommost section).

Ideally, a dissector could provide its own tap for service response times, and have it show up appropriately in the GUI and in TShark (i.e., the tap would not itself have any GUI code).  *Those* taps should go under the "Statistics -> Service Response Time" group.

Currently, we also have a top-level menu for Telephony statistics, probably because there are so many of them.  We may end up with other top-level menus if a particular category of statistics gets a lot of items - for example, if we had, say, 20 or so different tools for analyzing HTTP traffic, perhaps it should get its own top-level menu.