Dennis Peterson wrote:
Jim Redman wrote:
Your opinions, seem to be the prevalent attitude of the vocal
members of this list - if you don't suffer, it wasn't worth it.
His specific problem is he lacks the skill to install and manage the product.
It's rather sad to see that this elitist attitude - which was
commonplace on Usenet back in the early 90's - is still alive and well
here in 2006. I'm not sure why people who otherwise are enthusiastic
supporters of open source don't see how this damages the community.
The argument is also flawed. So, the people criticizing the OP's premise
all build their software from scratch, build their own OS distributions,
and never used packaged software - right? No? Do you at least review
all the source code before you install a package? No?
We've built up these layers not always because the end users don't have
the knowledge to reproduce them themselves, but because it would be a
waste of effort to replicate them. This hold as true for rewriting a
virus scanning engine from scratch as it does for writing your own
installation script. (If your environment requires custom behavior, then
by all means, write your own installation script...or for that matter,
customize the virus scanning engine.)
Ease of installation is valued by knowledgeable users also. Why spend
time on a problem that others have already solved hundreds of times
over. I'd much rather use my time in solving unexpected problems that
are specific to my environment.
There are good reasons why distributions providing packaged software are
the dominant distributions in use today.
Instead of attacking the OP's premise, a more productive response is
suggesting other repositories that offer better packages, and other
distributions that provide better designed packages, and fortunately
this information was provided by others in among the noise.
It would also be nice to see the project leaders show a better attitude
towards package maintainers. Not to say they necessarily have a poor
attitude towards them, but there wasn't anything positive put forth in
this thread. No one expects ClamAV to natively support specific
distributions, but a statement along the lines of "yeah, we've heard the
Fedora RPM isn't the smoothest install, but we're working with the
maintainer to improve it." Or, "we've accepted and incorporated numerous
patches from downstream packagers, so if you're having a problem with a
specific package, your best recourse is to report the problem to the
maintainer and have them report to us any changes that need to be made."
A related issue is how often it is recommended on the list just to build
from source. It's an understandable way to respond to packaging problems
on a project list, where the project has no direct control over the
packages. It's the fastest work-around, and the only short-term
solution. But it suggests that packaging for ClamAV seems to be more
problematic than for other comparable apps., and maybe that's because
more could be done in the core project to accommodate packagers.
-Tom
--
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
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