Re: Should dissect_tcp_pdus be used as much as possible?

[Guy Harris <guy () alum mit edu>]

On Jul 4, 2014, at 1:36 AM, Peter Wu <peter () lekensteyn nl> wrote:

> Should reassembly be enabled in as many TCP protocols as possible?

Yes.

> That is, is it desirable that TCP-based protocols use dissect_tcp_pdus with
> reassembly set to true?

That is a different question.

TCP-based protocols *where the data stream is broken up into PDUs, and the size of a PDU is always >= N, for some value 
of N > 0, and where the length of the PDU can always be calculated from the contents of the first N bytes of the 
protocol*, should use tcp_dissect_pdus with the reassembly parameter either hardwired to TRUE or passed as a 
user-configurable parameter that defaults to TRUE.

(That could be simplified to "should TCP-based protocols use tcp_dissect_pdus, *if possible*, with a default setting of 
"do reassembly?", to which the answer is "yes".)

However, not all TCP-based protocols are like that; HTTP, for example, isn't, and it uses different helper routines 
(see epan/req_resp_hdrs.[ch]).

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