BUG: clamav packages badly broken

[Florin Andrei]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> 
> Funny. The differerent design of the Fedora clamav packages has been a
> topic on various lists long ago. Actually, there's some rationale behind
> the complexity of the Fedora clamav packages:

They're not "complex". They're broken.

I can come up with countless examples of applications much more complex 
than clamav - their packages just work when installed.

Apache - it can do virtual hosts, reverse proxy and all sorts of fancy 
things. But the RPM package, once installed, Simply Works with a minimal 
setup. "service httpd start" launches a valid, working instance of the 
Apache server.
Want more than just the basics? Sure, knock yourself out, read the docs, 
change it.

Postfix - capable of doing virtual hosting, accounts via LDAP, the whole 
shebang. But the RPM package, once installed, launches an MTA with the 
basic functionality. You can surely tweak it to do a whole lot more. But 
initially it Simply Works: "service postfix start" and voila.

Clamav - install it, try to launch it, it fails. A lot of hacking is 
required to enable even the most basic functions. I cannot call that 
anything but broken.

> The packages include
> %doc files. You can't avoid reading them.

Yes, I can, and I should - if all I want is the most basic 
functionality. An RPM package should just work, with the basic functions 
enabled, once it's installed. This is true for more than 99% of all the 
RPM packages out there.
For some reason, clamav is deemed to be a very special case, although 
there's nothing so special about this software to justify releasing an 
RPM package that does not work out of the box.

> The packages are not compatible
> with Dag's packages. They have never been compatible with Dag's. This is
> no secret.

Nobody asked for compatibility with Dag's, nor is that a reasonable request.

Asking for basic functionality to just work out of the box, though, is a 
reasonable request, which the current clamav packages in EPEL fail to meet.

> They do work, albeit differently than Dag's.

Not the packages I installed today, they don't. Proof: install them, 
then run "service clamav-wrapper start" (or whatever is the name of that 
broken symlink). Anything happened at all?

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/