Re: [NSE] Strange bug in broadcast-ms-sql-discover

[Patrik Karlsson <patrik () cqure net>]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 11:24 PM, Patrick Donnelly <batrick () batbytes com>wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 12:44 PM, Patrik Karlsson <patrik () cqure net>
> wrote:
> > I'm not all that happy with scripts silently failing unless running in
> debug
> > mode.
> > Does anyone else feel that this isn't all that great either?
>
> It's an interesting problem. On one hand, it's a nice way for scripts
> to signal that they are "done" for whatever reason. Maybe the host
> isn't running the right service after all or a different version of
> the service is running. While most scripts simply return nil from the
> action in these cases, I think it's reasonable to want to throw an
> error too. For this reason, seeing "normal" (not unexpected) errors in
> the regular output would be really annoying.
>
> On the other hand, seeing error output can be useful as it often tells
> the user how they messed up.
>
> [Of course, we can expand NSE to allow for certain "flavors" of errors
> which don't cause error output. For example, going along with our
> psuedo-pthread approach, we could add a stdnse.exit function which
> terminates the script silently with X reason if debugging is enabled.
> The advantage here is that you can terminate the script anywhere (even
> in a library) so that you don't need awkward return code checking
> everywhere.]
>
> --
> - Patrick Donnelly

I agree with you that seeing "normal" errors would be really annoying.
What I'm after is seeing those errors that generate stack traces in debug
mode.
This way the people that run Nmap in non-debug mode could actually see that
something went wrong, and that it wasn't an intentional empty response, and
would hopefully file a bug report.

//Patrik
-- 
Patrik Karlsson
http://www.cqure.net
http://twitter.com/nevdull77
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