Ethereal Developers, I'm working on a server application that makes use of several protocols, some of which change rapidly. These protocols are encapsulated in a wide variety of existing Open Source projects, such as GAIM, icqlib, Ethereal, and so forth. It seems a shame that there is such duplication of effort and it seemed to me that a great long-term direction would be to have a central repository containing structured descriptions of all protocols that would be maintained in common and then used by many different codebases using many different languages.
This way, when Yahoo! messenger's protocol changes, all Open Source software that uses the protocol could be updated in one fell swoop. Ideally, effort would be made in designing this metaformat to make adding and maintaining protocol descriptions easy. I've seen this discussed in passing on the Ethereal-dev list a few times, with mention of the benefits that could be provided (such as revising formats on-the-fly without need for a full recompile or even a compile environment). It seems the right way to do things, long-term. Is this the right place to discuss such a possible eventuality? Do you folks agree that that's the right direction in which to be headed? Sincerely, David Weekly
