Re: text format stability

[Michael Richardson <mcr () sandelman ottawa on ca>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----


Let me just say that I have been bit by the chances to tcpdump in
my own work. Fortunately, it is being compared against previous output
with diff, so updating is much easier.

For those that need to have in a digestable format, we need to have
another solution. A type=value output. Whether in XML wrapping or, 
done up to make Perl happy ($thing=value;), I don't know or care.

To do this we need to seperate collecting the values from printing them.
At this point I begin to wonder if doing it all in C is even a good
idea. 

Maybe embedding perl (or guile, or tcl, or python) is smarter, and do
the unpacking with unpack(). It likely won't be much slower (and, if
speed is a concern, what are you doing printing stuff in real time
anyway!), and it certainly will be safer.  New dissectors might just
become new strings in a config file. 

- --
]     "Elmo went to the wrong fundraiser" - The Simpson         |  firewalls  [
]   Michael Richardson,    Xelerance Corporation, Ottawa, ON    |net architect[
] mcr () xelerance com      http://www.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca/mcr/ |device driver[
] panic("Just another Debian GNU/Linux using, kernel hacking, security guy"); [

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Finger me for keys

iQCVAwUBQNxIYIqHRg3pndX9AQHG7AP/VwwDGUC8y88IvlV8kkLfS2m3rAuS4K8l
P69qk/OGID2loE7SgScGKV4lTKaQzdo/IEbOZGOB7+H8nMT4cqkXLvYUAvCOj7jW
+qjP8Xb8Sbe5YoYTJKD/yq3lLPSxtln12wX/EUm9JD5BqfSnZXZ47Pkjw0vgOi5M
1m1yvioXS0Y=
=I0JA
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
-
This is the tcpdump-workers list.
Visit https://lists.sandelman.ca/ to unsubscribe.