[Bro-Dev] [JIRA] (BIT-924) String BIFs Return 1-indexed string_arrays

[grigorescu (JIRA)]

    [ https://bro-tracker.atlassian.net/browse/BIT-924?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=18615#comment-18615 ] 

grigorescu commented on BIT-924:
--------------------------------

I think more generally, we want a good way to be able to make breaking changes to BIFs and the base scripts, which can be thought of as an API. As more and more people are writing custom scripts and depending on certain behavior, this will be harder to change. At the same time, we don't want to handcuff ourselves from making these changes if needed.

A couple of things we could do are:

* Have a special section in NEWS about changes that break current functionality
* We could have depreciation warnings in reporter.log, but people don't often check this. Maybe we need a deprecated.log that scripts/BIFs that are deprecated will write to? We could also elevated this by printing something in stdout/stderr (e.g. "Warning - your Bro instance is using deprecated features that will be removed in a future release. Please check deprecated.log for details.")

With this kind of notification, I could see a staged approach to "fix" these string functions (using split as an example, obviously extended to all the functions above):

# Create split_0 and deprecate split
# Rename split_0 to split, create a deprecated split_1 that implements the old functionality
# Remove split_1

Of course, if we're comfortable with the amount of notification users would get, we could shorten this as needed.

> String BIFs Return 1-indexed string_arrays
> ------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: BIT-924
>                 URL: https://bro-tracker.atlassian.net/browse/BIT-924
>             Project: Bro Issue Tracker
>          Issue Type: Problem
>          Components: Bro
>    Affects Versions: git/master
>            Reporter: grigorescu
>             Fix For: 2.4
>
>
> The following BIFs return 1-indexed string_arrays:
> * sort_string_array
> * split
> * split1
> * split_all
> * split_n



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