Mailing List Archive

Hello Renaud,

> Sorry, I never got back to you on your patches. I thank you for them,
> however changing the grammar of the language means breaking the backward
> compatibility.
>
> That is, if someone ever uses the improvements you did, and that plugin
> ever gets pushed to the Nessus plugin feed, then a ton of users would
> experience compilation errors when starting up Nessus.

Of course this is a valid concern. And you're free to change the nasl
language in any way you like. However if you're concerned with backward
compatibility forever, the evolution of nasl has stopped at this point.
However I think there is always room for improvements and it would be
counter-productive if the Nessus community will be stuck forever with
the current state of the language.

Checking for language features could be done with a predefined variable
which contains a language version number something like:

if(NASL_LANGUAGE_VER < 2.1)
{
display("nasl too old. Please update to libnasl 2.x.y\n");
exit(1);
}

As you want your users to upgrade their Nessus programs to the latest
versions, they will eventually be able to run plugins using new language
features.

> Some of the stuff (the include path) should find their way in, though.

My include path solution is not optimal yet, because the exact semantics
of (relative) include paths and a concept of the current working
directory of the nasl interpreter has to be discussed.

--
---> Dirk Jagdmann ^ doj / cubic
----> http://cubic.org/~doj
-----> http://llg.cubic.org
_______________________________________________
Plugins-writers mailing list
Plugins-writers@list.nessus.org
http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/plugins-writers