<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Eric Paris wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:1218640141.3540.38.camel@localhost.localdomain" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 21:33 -0300, Klaus Heinrich Kiwi wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">I think that if we take this discussion to extremes, we'd be talking about a 'self-descriptive meta language' so that upgrades to userspace/kernel are well covered (can you say "xml"?) </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> HAHAHA, kernel output xml? dream on :) I'm willing to do wholesale output changes, but something that heavy in kernel is impossible to push. I can just see Al cussing up a storm as he read that. </pre> </blockquote> Just to be clear no one is suggesting XML or anything heavy weight. Rather what is being suggested are trivial changes. For example string values are always enclosed in double quotes with interior characters properly escaped, or that non-decimal integer values include a radix prefix. I think one could simply summarize this as saying the lexical structure of value tokens match the lexical structure of the C programming language tokens which is pretty simple but unambiguous (plus there is a wealth of code to generate and parse these simple ubiquitous tokens). The implementation would be equally simple. Code which generates audit data calls a printf style varargs function which takes a format string and optional parameters. This single simple call is responsible for formatting a few basic data types which observes the token rules. To handle backward compatibility auparse could insulate users from the format changes by looking for either the old or new format, preferring the newer version. <pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">-- John Dennis <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:jdennis@redhat.com"><jdennis@redhat.com></a> </pre> </body> </html>