Summary

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This chapter has outlined some of the most important parts of developing in Ethereal. There are several kinds of components to which you can contribute:

• Protocol Dissectors

• Plug-ins

• The Ethereal GUI

• Tools

This chapter went into great detail documenting the proper steps to take when creating a dissector. By consulting the README.developer document in the doc directory, you can cut and paste a template to help you get started. However, since the document does not clearly define each step necessary in the development process, this chapter attempts to provide these steps in a logical order. You first modify the header and the include statements. We then register the protocol dissector. Finally, create the dissector code to actually decode the data. The important factor in the decode section is to utilize the hf array in the register function so that elements can be filtered upon.

This chapter also covered several advanced topics including a basic guide to GTK programming. Many of the topics covered will be experienced by someone creating a protocol dissector. Handling of the advanced topic issues correctly can eliminate many hours of unnecessary work and research. After debugging your work, make sure you go back and cleanup as much of the code as possible. Insert comments to make the code clear. In addition, make sure you remove unused variable definitions. If possible, clean up any remaining warnings displayed in the compile process by your compiler. Finally, please contribute your modifications back to the Ethereal project by e-mailing a patch to the ethereal-dev mailing list. Again, make certain that any information that you contribute back to Ethereal is not going to violate any proprietary claims. Ethereal is released under the GPL and all contributions should be consistent with this licensing agreement.

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