[Clamav-users] Problem with internal logger

[Julian Field]

On 2 Jun 2006, at 08:39, Anthony Peacock wrote:

> Hi Julian,
>
> Julian Field wrote:
>> On 1 Jun 2006, at 16:30, Kai Schaetzl wrote:
>>> Julian Field wrote on Thu, 1 Jun 2006 14:04:52 +0100:
>>>
>>>> My easy-to-install ClamAV+SA package configures freshclam.conf and
>>>> spamd.conf for you, by commenting out the "Example" lines.
>>>
>>> and then sets the mirror to US ?
>> No, as I don't know what country you might be in. It just gets it  
>> working for you, saving new users a nasty catch which will confuse  
>> them entirely. Doing things like this annoys me, as they don't  
>> produce a nice error message telling the user what they need to do  
>> to alleviate the problem. It's a case of "Switch this option on to  
>> make anything work, default is off". I know I do it myself, but I  
>> do at least generate a polite error message which tells the user  
>> they need to set their company name in MailScanner.conf.
>> I am considering removing it from MailScanner.
>> If the %org-name% has not been configured, then I just use the  
>> domain name by using Sys::Hostname::Long which is already needed  
>> by SpamAssassin so most people have it installed already. I  
>> replace the hostname with www to get the website address, and put  
>> the same in %org-long-name% as %org-name%.
>> Does that sound rather better than the current "I'm not going to  
>> start" behaviour.
>
> I wouldn't really be in favour of this.
>
> A side-effect of the current behaviour is that it forces the person  
> installing the system to at least open and look at the config file  
> first.
>
> I don't think anyone should be installing something as important as  
> mailscanner without at least understanding what the default options  
> are doing.

But I really hate all those systems which are "broken by default".  
Very often after installing something I want to try starting it up to  
see if it runs at all or whether I still have stuff left to install  
such as other Perl modules in MailScanner's case. The fact that  
"service MailScanner start" doesn't work until I start wading into  
config files, of which I know neither the name nor the location,  
really annoys me with other systems.

So I don't want to inflict the same annoyance on other people.

I want the system to be intelligent and make up sensible settings for  
me until I find where the config files are and how to edit them.

Always imagine yourself as a complete newbie installing it for the  
first time, only half knowing what you are doing with a command-line  
at all having been brought up on Windows systems.
-- 
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
Buy the MailScanner book at www.MailScanner.info/store
PGP footprint: EE81 D763 3DB0 0BFD E1DC 7222 11F6 5947 1415 B654


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