ABI guarantee for auditd

[Steve Grubb]

On Thursday, January 15, 2015 02:34:16 PM hsultan at thefroid.net wrote:
> On 2015-01-15 12:44, Steve Grubb wrote:
> > On Thursday, January 15, 2015 12:24:38 PM hsultan at thefroid.net wrote:
> >> Regarding auditd, what is the ABI guarantee ? Do you guarantee that
> >> the
> >> text contained in audit_reply->msg.data will always be the same
> >> format ?
> >> I imagine you reserve the right to add fields, but how about
> >> removing
> >> any or even reordering them ?
> > 
> > Its happens on occasion. Requirements change, bugs are found, new
> > features asked for.
> 
> Thanks, that tells me most of what I need, one last thing : do you
> happen to know if the 'big' distribs(Ubuntu,RH,CentOS,Debian...) ship
> those format changes only in new releases of their distribs, or do they
> include them in patches for existing releases as well ?

I can't speak for other distributions, but if I find a mistake in the audit 
records, I fix it to be right rather than hold ABI and stay forever wrong. This 
doesn't happen very often. The audit records are mostly stable. But there are 
155 different records.

-Steve