Spicy new versions compatability to Older Zeek versions

Spicy
1

Hello everyone,
Since Spicy has been getting a lot of bug fixes and new features recently, I wonder if it’s possible to install Zeek v6.0.0 with a newer Spicy version?

I know that when building Zeek from source you can specify in “configure” the spicy install dir, I tried doing it with spicy’s newest version but I’m getting some errors about missing objects.

Do newer versions of Spicy support “older” versions of Zeek? (I just doubt that this is the problem since v6 is not that old)

Thanks in advance!

2

The main issue would be that the plugin for Spicy in Zeek makes use of Spicy APIs which changed or went away while we evolved Spicy (we e.g., did some work in Spicy since zeek-6.0.0 which changed how ASTs look in Spicy).

We do not actively test mixing different versions, so the best way to find out is to try. The easiest way is probably to bump the Spicy submodule in a Zeek checkout and then do a build from that, e.g.,

$ git clone --recurse-submodules \
            --branch v6.0.8 https://github.com/zeek/zeek

$ cd zeek/auxil/spicy
$ git checkout main # Bump bundled Spicy.
$ cd ../..

$ ./configure

I just checked and this indeed fails because of the Spicy AST changes. We do not backport features (like support for newer Spicy versions) to patch releases, so you would be on your own. In any case, support for zeek-6 is going away soon, so moving to zeek-7 might be a better idea anyway.