[Zeek-Dev] support for event handlers using a subset of parameters

[Jon Siwek]

On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 1:30 PM Vlad Grigorescu <vlad at es.net> wrote:

> I _think_ I like Seth's idea of records, but I'm still thinking it through. It would formalize a growing trend towards moving more parameters into records anyway. If we're worried about backwards compatibility, then maybe we have a built in version number in each record. Whenever fields are added/removed, or there are more subtle contextual changes, the version number could increase.

Explicit versioning is a neat idea to maybe try expanding on.  I'm not
quite sure how it would look for the user to, when they write their
code, make it explicit that they expect the semantics of the record to
match version XYZ.  But yeah, on our end, we could ensure that if we
see someone wanted XYZ, we send them that version of the record, which
matches their semantic expectations.

> As a concrete example, the is_server parameter of the ssh_capabilities event was being set backwards (effectively as "is_client.")

In this particular example, the way I would have wanted to solve it
with my proposed patch would be: deprecate "is_server", document it as
actually meaning "is client" (don't change semantics of that parameter
to avoid breaking user code that is already doing the inversion), but
do introduce a new "is_client" which actually means "is client", then
later remove "is_server".

- Jon