Question concerning -l option

Please forgive me, I assume this has already been addressed in the mail archive but I've been unable to locate a related thread. Can someone tell me why the default for auditd is O_NOFOLLOW for accessing auditd configuration files? I assume there is a reason for not supporting links as the default that is important enough to justify the extra work to add the -l option but it is not clear to me. Thanks, Tom Hall Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.