Nmap Development mailing list archives
Re: NSE argument table syntax
From: David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:12:49 -0600
On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 10:32:20PM -0300, Joao Correa wrote:
Thanks for the answer. I've discussed it a little with Patrick and we also agreed that it is not a great deal. I was just worried about making a function to keep it simpler for the future scripts. Do we expect that the backwards compatibility still works on these scripts to come? If so, it would be nice to have such function. I agree that the patch is not working, I've also found some other situations where it won't fix the problem. Sorry for not having updated it earlier. There are 4 scripts that use table arguments and it is not hard to make the manual checkings on them. The problem is just that it will be a recurrent problem for the future, as mentioned.
I don't understand why it will be a future problem. If we're going to make scripts take arguments like --script=scriptname.arg=val then there's no reason to even support --script=scriptname={arg=val} in new scripts. When I was talking about backwards compatibility, I was thinking about someone who perhaps has a shell script that runs a command using the old script argument format. We don't want to break all those commands. But in new scripts there's no previous version to be compatible with.
Also, there is one more problem. Using the new syntax requires programmers to use nmap.registry.args['table.arg'] instead of nmap.registry.args.table.arg. I don't know if everyone agrees, but I think that it can make the code a little dirtier.
That's a valid point. I agree it doesn't look as good. I think people usually store the script arguments in local variables, so it doesn't affect that much code. I think it would be better if better if programmers could use the second syntax. I think you are right that the external user interface is the most important. If we can have both then that's even better. David Fifield _______________________________________________ Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev Archived at http://SecLists.Org
Current thread:
- NSE argument table syntax Joao Correa (Jun 22)
- Re: NSE argument table syntax David Fifield (Jun 22)
- Re: NSE argument table syntax Joao Correa (Jun 22)
- Re: NSE argument table syntax Kris Katterjohn (Jun 22)
- Re: NSE argument table syntax David Fifield (Jun 22)
- Re: NSE argument table syntax Joao Correa (Jun 23)
- Re: NSE argument table syntax Joao Correa (Jun 22)
- Re: NSE argument table syntax David Fifield (Jun 22)