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List:       ethereal-users
Subject:    Re: [Ethereal-users] Registering Dissectors
From:       Guy Harris <gharris () sonic ! net>
Date:       2005-10-26 19:03:26
Message-ID: 435FD2FE.7070904 () sonic ! net
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Becker, Thomas J (ISD, IT) wrote:

> I have upgraded Ethereal to V 0.10.12 and WinPcap 3.1 on Windows XP with 
> SP1. Every time I start Ethereal I get a messages stating it is now 
> registering dissectors. After that every thing proceed normally.

Yes.  That's Ethereal's "splash screen".  Many applications that take a 
noticeable time to start up put up a "splash screen" early in the 
startup process, so that the user gets feedback that the application is 
starting up (at least some versions of Acrobat Reader do that on Windows).

The Ethereal splash screen shows other messages, but some of them might 
be displayed for such a short period of time that you don't see them, 
because that stage of startup takes little time.

> Is this normal behavior?

As others have noted, yes.

> Why must it register the dissectors every time?

Because

	1) for dissectors built into Ethereal, we haven't implemented a scheme 
in which, for example, Ethereal can be run with a special flag that 
writes out the information entered into its data structures for those 
dissectors in a form that can be quickly read in, so that the 
installation process can run Ethereal with that flag and install a file 
with that information (which might be worth doing if calling the 
dissectors to register themselves takes a long time; it takes less than 
a second on my 1.5 GHz PowerBook, but it presumably takes longer on 
older machines);

	2) for plugin dissectors, Ethereal doesn't know until it starts up what 
dissectors there are to register.

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