On Sep 2, 2012, at 8:50 AM, Jaap Keuter wrote:
> On 08/14/2012 06:57 PM, Guy Harris wrote:
>>
>> On Aug 14, 2012, at 9:32 AM, Graham Bloice wrote:
>>
>>> I did wonder, but someone asked for it.
>>
>> OK, I've asked him in his ask.wireshark.org question why he wants to do that.
>
> Well, was his answer[1] sufficient?
The answer was
> My plugin postdissector dissects certain proprietary suboption fields found under TCP options, they used to be displayed as "Unknown". Currently I'm just hiding the associated text node by changing it to a hidden node, but I wanted to know if it was possible to remove the redundant text node instead, just in case.
I'm not sure what "suboption fields" means here.
If he means "options", then, well, he shouldn't be doing that:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/tcp-parameters/tcp-parameters.xml
has no "reserved for vendor proprietary hacks" values, and
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3692
says that those values might not be a good idea. In that case, he should just hack up the TCP dissector to support the option in question; perhaps that requirement would be sufficient punishment to discourage that sort of behavior.
If he means "suboptions", *and* the option for which he's inserted suboptions is one that has an explicit mechanism for adding vendor-specified options, then we should perhaps add a dissector table for those options so he can plug in his dissector. (If it has no such mechanism, see previous paragraph.)
I'll ask which TCP option he's adding suboptions to.
