Re: audit user space build problems

Recently, distributions moved to building against gcc-12 for their latest OS composes. It's been found in at least 2 distributions that the user space package is failing to build. It's natural to think this is related to gcc-12 since it's the obvious change. However, the problem is a combination of 2 things: 1) SWIG is making buggy code 2) The kernel changed to using flexible array members The issue specifically is with struct audit_rules_data. At the bottom, it was using buf[0]; But on 5.17, it uses buf[]; It turns out that gcc-12 is just a coincidence and anything using gcc-12 also has the newest kernel. The options are: 1) Report this as a SWIG bug and wait 2) Rewrite the libaudit python bindings to not use SWIG 3) Ask for buf[0]; to be reinstated in the kernel. Of these, I think option 2 is the only viable long term option. It will take some time to write new python bindings that preserve the SWIG api. A short term fix might be for distros to copy the kernel header into the lib directory and patch it to restore buf[0];, then change libaudit.c to include "audit.h" instead of <linux/audit.h>. There may be other approaches.