

BUG: clamav packages badly broken

Just a few quick observations:

I am trying to use clamd with amavis and Postfix. Amavis is supposed to pass the attachments to clamd via a Unix socket. That's how it worked for a while with the clamav packages made by Dag Wieers, no problems at all.

Today I uninstalled Dag's packages and installed the EPEL ones instead. Big mistake.

The /etc/init.d stuff is badly broken. There isn't even a script proper, there's just a symlink to a wrapper. The wrapper file is not in the recognized init.d scripts style.

There's a clamd.init file somewhere in /usr/share, but there's a <SERVICE> tag in it that needs to be adjusted. That same tag is somehow propagated in the clamd.sysconfig file and possibly in a buch of other places. No explanation for its purpose. The way it currently is, the scripts just fail.

Why is the package failing to work after install? Why it doesn't just work? Why the over-engineered customization with <SERVICE>?

There's a bunch of CLAMD_SERVICE variables sprinkled all over the place in the wrapper script, that appears to be related to the <SERVICE> tag. Holy freaking bejesus. Why should I care about that? If I wanted to care about that, I would install clamav from source, thank you very much.

After installing clamav-server and the related packages, the stuff should Just Work (TM). It should not require dozens of obscure tweaks. What's the point in having a package otherwise?

The Dag packages simply worked, as they always do, perhaps with some small adjustments in the .conf file. I uninstalled them today, due to a conflict with EPEL and thought I could use the EPEL packages instead. How silly of me. If I can't figure out how to make the EPEL stuff work, I'll have to go back to Dag's packages and set up all kinds of exceptions in yum, to work around the broken EPEL packages.

How did these packages go through the verifications before being made public?

Meanwhile my mail server can either be offline, or without an antivirus. Merry Christmas. :-(

Florin Andrei

