Re: Thoughts on script documentation

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 03:50:34PM +0100, Jan-Oliver Wagner wrote:
> On Mittwoch, 8. Dezember 2010, David Fifield wrote:
>
> If I remember some discussion correctly it was said it is
> currently too trouble-provoking to offer a Feed service with NSEs because
> the API changes too much. The only thing one can rely on
> is that the NSEs delivered with a release are compatible with the nmap
> of the very same release.
>
> Or is Nmap meanwhile ready to offer a Feed service?

To some extent those are both correct.  The current situation is that
Nmap doesn't offer an NSE feed service and we only guarantee that
scripts will work with the version of Nmap they were delivered with.

Of course svn acts like a feed service to some degree.  Unix users can
generally just cd into their Nmap working directory and 'svn up; make'
to get the latest code and scripts.  Unfortunately that doesn't work
as well for users of Nmap on Windows, Mac, and many handheld devices
that lack a compiler.

Because of these limitations in the "svn up; make" update system, we
may introduce a formal feed for Nmap script and data files at some
point.  But deciding on the best way to do this will take a lot of
thought.  And we'll have to either add features for recognizing
incompatibilities (e.g. scripts which use features which aren't
available in the user's version of Nmap) or we'll have to include new
executables in the update feed too.

Cheers,
Fyodor
_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/