From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Patrick McHardy Subject: Re: POM Xtables??? Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:34:30 +0200 Message-ID: <486A4076.8080007@trash.net> References: <935fab200806271054oa7c340evbf465b7a9984498b@mail.gmail.com> <4866F152.7030109@riverviewtech.net> <935fab200806300904rc7dc7b2kf58ab7893c3ef20a@mail.gmail.com> <486907EA.60105@trash.net> <48694787.3080906@trash.net> <4869FCE7.9000404@trash.net> <486A1865.40106@trash.net> <486A39BF.4090206@riverviewtech.net> <486A3AD6.7040905@trash.net> <486A3EDA.8030804@riverviewtech.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <486A3EDA.8030804@riverviewtech.net> Sender: netfilter-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" To: Grant Taylor Cc: Mail List - Netfilter , Netfilter Developer Mailing List Again, please don't trim CC lists. Grant Taylor wrote: > On 07/01/08 09:10, Patrick McHardy wrote: >> In any case, its unreasonable to expect us to never *extend* (not >> change) the output to accomodate buggy parsers. This is by the way >> the same way that is often used to extend binary structures, even >> though someone stupid might use exact size checks. > > *nod* > > Agreed. > > However as I sit here and think about it, it may be worth adding a new > field *as early as possible* (read closes to the start of line) in the > field list that indicates a version, which can be used to determine > the fields and their position there in. This would make it very easy > for people to write strict parsers down the road. A simple three > character hex field (4 bytes including the leading space) would allow > for 4k of strict layouts. (Even more 0-9 and a-z or additionally > A-Z.) Just a thought. I don't it would be very useful at this time since we already made those changes over the time of multiple years, so basically the damage (if any) is already done. And we have ULOG and nfnetlink_log that should be used for anything serious for the reasons I stated earlier (more reliable, doesn't block when using serial consoles, ...).