James Kosin wrote:
Like Dennis said "Bringing it all together is what the admin is for."
I disagree. There are some things which are the admin's job, but they
are not the catch-all for all unresolved burdens ("bringing it all
together").
Pardon my lecture, but lets review the root of our discipline:
The purpose of computers is to shift the workload of as many tasks as
possible away from the human and toward automation, freeing up the human
to address more sophisticated problems they were previously unable to
address due to those workloads.
This is the mantra of the entirety of computing. If you are working
with computers, and this isn't the focus of what you're doing, even
indirectly, then you're not contributing to the domains of computer
science and/or computer engineering. Period. No ifs ands nor buts.
Even with games: the "more sophisticated problem" is "having more
complex/sophisticated environments for recreation".
Notice that I did NOT say "users", I said "humans". This applies across
the entire scope of computing, and not just at the level of "what do we
provide to the end user?"
For the hardware developer (whether it's chip developers or platform
developers), their burden is to reduce the workload of everyone by
increasing the overall capacity of the systems ... but more directly,
they should also be reducing the workload of the system engineer.
The system engineer has three groups whose workload they need to reduce:
system administrators, application developers, and users.
Application developers have two groups (depending upon the scope of the
application): other application devleopers, system administrators, and
users.
System administrators have two groups they need to address: application
developers and users.
Users also have groups they need to address: themselves (if they're not
going to leverage the tool to allow them to accomplish tasks that their
previous drudgery was preventing them from addressing, then what's the
point?), and non-computer users that are their "customers" (the bank
teller who can not give you more information than they used to, because
the information is all now at their finger tips ... before computers at
the bank teller, they couldn't do that).
ClamAV is an application. Its target audience is all three of the ones
I mentioned for application developers. Therefore, the developers of
ClamAV have the burden of reducing the workload of system
administrators, users, and other application developers. The obvious
manner in which they address this is "making it easier to identify
viruses so that the user or sysadmin can eliminate the virus from their
environment, or so that other applications may leverage this
identification process for automated deletion/interception of viruses".
But, that is not the only manner in which application developers should
reduce burdens (at the level of the problem being solved). They should
also reduce other burdens where they can, such as reducing the ergonomic
burden of the user (ie. better user interface design). And they should
reduce the burden of the system administrator by making the application
easier to maintain at the system administration level. That means doing
things like using standard installation locations, using standard
configuration tools, etc.
It also means using easier and more reliable packaging and
installation/removal mechanisms. Reduce the burden of the system
administrator by making the installation task more streamlined, more
reliable, and easier.
So, to get back to the original quote:
"Bringing it all together is what the admin is for."
No. You do not get to simply dump this burden upon the sysadmin. That
burden is shared across the entire domain of computing. Each person is
responsible for "bringing it together" for the community to which they
are providing an automation.
You might say "but this subject is the responsibility, within
'Application Development' of the release engineer, and ClamAV doesn't
have enough release engineering volunteers to address more sophisticated
release engineering processes". OK, that's a reasonable response. But
that's saying "we don't have enough resources to address one of our
burdens". That means "the request was valid, but we can't address it".
That is ENTIRELY different from a response of "the request is
unreasonable/invalid because our consumer should just be willing to do
more work" (effectively what the OP's detractors have been saying).
BZZT. That response directly contradicts the central purpose of
computing. Therefore, that response is inherently wrong and inappropriate.
_______________________________________________
http://lurker.clamav.net/list/clamav-users.html
