README.interface

The following will export addresses from ethereal to the plugins. You
will have to do this, e.g. if you want to use a function of ethereal inside 
your plugin.
If you need it the other way round (e.g. use symbols of your plugin inside of 
ethereal's gtk part), you only have to edit libethereal.def and nothing more.
(XXX - is this libethereal.def description correct?)


When developing a plugin in the Win32 world, it is nessecary
to explicitly export addresses from the main process to the
plugin.  ethereal does have a mechanism for this, and it uses
the file 'plugin_api_list.c' to list declarations for everything
that needs to be exported.

The build process of ethereal needs this list in 5 different forms.

These are generated by a Python script and saved in the X* files
in this directory.

I do not have a real C parser in Python to read the input file...,
so I have used 'gcc -aux-info xyzzy ...' to clean up any formatting
preferences in the input file and create the file named 'xyzzy'
that contains a neatly formatted list of declarations.  This list
can be parsed with a regular expression to extract the required
info.

Use the following procedure to update the symbols:

edit the plugin_api_list.c file
nmake -f Makefile.nmake xyzzy
nmake -f Makefile.nmake

The 'xyzzy' makefile target is the only target that depends on gcc.
This can be done on a Unix machine or you can use cygwin gcc.