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Re: include much needed antivirus products in FC2

Michael Schwendt wrote:

On Tue, 6 Jan 2004 15:48:08 +0100 (CET), Thomas Munck Steenholdt wrote:



Now that I have heard som much good about the quality about the packages
at fedora.us, i decided to try to yum the packages for clamav onto my
test system... Let me just say that those packages are certainly not of
a quality that can even begin to compare against what we're used to from
the core packages... A core package can safely be assumed to install
cleanly.



The clamav packages do install cleanly.


Sure, but it won't work out-of-the-box, and it really needs to (or at least it needs to "almost" work
out-of-the-box, like I said.



It will have it's init scripts added to the chkconfig setup,
provide a decent default configuration file that can be modified slightly
to fit the users needs and if the package includes a daemon it can then
be started with a "service foo_service start" command.

Neither is the case with the clamav packages from fedora.us. First of all
a number of manual customizations has to be made in order to start the
daemon... including installing the default conf file, adding init scripts
and a lot of other things...



You have misunderstood the necessary set-up procedure completely.
Included is a README with the necessary steps plus a couple of config file
templates which are pre-configured except for a few lines which you must
uncomment/modify yourself according to the instructions.
Please read some of the explanations in the package request ticket
here: https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=268



I have not misunderstood it - It's just not a very efficient way for a package to install...
I have to select and move files around to get the daemon running... there is a wrapper in init.d
that's not executable... meaning that it will not work before changet to work in one way or the other.
Besides that file isn't even chkconfig aware (on purpose) which makes no sense for a freshly installed
package that's part of a distribution. It also depends on stuff like fedora.us specific useradm packages
and stuff like that, and it consists of a number of packages that doesn't really make much sense either.
(I say one package including server and client - everything needed to run - then additional packages
for devel and possibly milter and clamdmail or something, if they can't be part of the base packages)

Imagine if all packages in the Fedora Core 1 set required this kind of manual customization to run
Would you be able to have a server/workstation running in a full day??? Unlikely!!!
Perhaps if you were absolutely fine-tuned and up-to-date on the datails of each package in the
distro - But lets face it - nobody would be able to do this without looking into some manuals and
such.

This is NOT the way that packages should work if we at some point expact end-users to be able to
install a linux system!

This is not how things should work, and that was the feeling I had of the
non-core distros, when I suggested to include an antivirus package in the
core distribution.

I'm not afraid to do stuff on my own, but having to do so post-install
customization just to get stuff started really kinda defeat the purpose of
rpm and all our repository tools like yum and apt. It's nice that we can
quickly install a needed package - but if we need to spend half an hour
configuring the blasted thing before it will even start,



It certainly doesn't take half an hour.


Sure it will, if you just wanted an antivirus product, saw clamav, decided to install it and never
saw it before... Heck it'll probably take longer, even for somebody experienced with linux but new
to clamav.



we might just
as well have downloaded the tarball and compiled the stuff from scratch.
for a comparison (for those of you trying to install clamav from fedora.us)
check out the package made by Petr Kristof
http://crash.fce.vutbr.cz/crash-hat/1/clamav/ those are packages so much
nicer that the fedora.us ones.



I'm not the packager of the clamav packages, but I have participated in
the reviews. That someone else's package can be started right after
installation -- even as a single daemon -- does not mean that it is
"better" or "nicer" or more flexible or anything like that. It just suits
your requirements more because you refuse to adjust configuration files.



That's exactly what we need for a complete, user friendly and polished distribution!!!

I never said that I couldn't get it to work, I just think that packages should be a lot more efficient if
they should even be considered part of the extras... The goal is to have stuff installed and
configured with minimal efford.

If package-quality is going to be like this for the extras, I don't think
that extras will be very successful or even useful.



See below.



As a note, please notice that the clamav packages are te only ones I've
tried from fedora.us, and I'm in no way trying to insult the many skilled
developers maintaining packages on fedora.us.



With the previous paragraph you did exactly that. Please pick some other
packages -- maybe a normal application or a game. These don't require
security relevant adjustments or editing config files.



Again - I'm not here to insult anyone, I'm raising a flag saying that this will not be a success
for unskilled persons that try to install linux for the first time... For the rest of the highly skilled
linux community all the manual changes will just be a pain in the b*tt!

Take the postfix package included in core as an example... It does require security related
adjustments, it also does require you to modify config files in order to make it work like you
want... Still it installs and works in a very basic setup without any post-install configurations!
That's the kind of install we'll want for all packages.

Thomas



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