[clamav-users] ClamAV® blog: ClamAV 0.104.0 Release Candidate is here!

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi Micah,

On Fri, 23 Jul 2021, Micah Snyder (micasnyd) via clamav-users wrote:

> I'm sad to hear how much effort it was to install CMake ...

It's the sort of thing that happens with computers. :/

> ... very surprised to hear that it crashed your machine.

To be fair it's not hard to crash a Raspberry Pi4B.  They're not at
all like the earlier models.  The 3B+ that I use for my desktop has
always been a lot more reliable.  Frankly if I knew three years ago
what I know about them now I'd have been against getting them, but a
lot of effort is invested into making them work and they pretty much
do what's needed of them for a power consumption of a few percent of
that used by the boxes they replaced.  Things like AMD Opterons can
use more power than a Pi just for the cooling fans.  Our Pis don't
have cooling fans.

> ... Which os/distro/arch are you using?

Linux, Raspbian (as near as dammit Debian), armhf.  Raspberry Pi4B,
4G RAM, all storage is NFS mounted over 1Gbit/s Ethernet.

> You mention Debian Stretch (9) ...

That was then.  Now it's Buster (10).  In case it matters, I built
cmake just for the user which builds the ClamAV binaries, it wasn't a
system-wide install.  I didn't build these systems myself; I just did
the mail stuff, and I didn't want to break anything which might want
to use the system's cmake - I don't even know if anything does.

> ... in a new docker debian:9 container it takes 2.971 seconds ...
>    real    0m5.178s
>    user    0m2.971s

Well 5.178 seconds by the wall clock, but that was still over 3,600
times faster!

> You're right that milter is required by default now.  The approach
> with the old build system was so the optional stuff would be skipped
> if you didn't have it. ... we ...  don't test the project in every
> variation ...  users should still be able to expect that a default
> build gives them all the features.

All understood.  To me it seems like a lot of big steps all at once
with a project that has so many users with such a wide variety of
systems, use cases and and skill sets but I guess we'll get to know
more about that when the 0.104 release actually hits the fan. :)

> ... you can use `-D ENABLE_MILTER=OFF` and then skip the milter ...

Sure, I saw that in the docs but didn't want to throw any more
spanners into the works than I had there already.  Normally I don't
build the milter because the clamd server doesn't run an MTA, my
own milters run on the mail servers and handle the communications
with the clamd server.

> Sorry I really have zero interest in bringing back and update
> Autotools for 0.104.  For what it's worth, we do plan to publish a
> clamav 0.103.4 patch version alongside an 0.104.1 version in
> probably 2 months (give or take).  Depending on how 0.104 adoption
> goes, we could have an 0.103.5 version as well, but I don’t expect
> that we will.

It doesn't matter to me of course, now that I've built a version of
cmake which can build ClamAV, but going back to the numbers of users
and the variety of systems I just wonder if it's going to cause you
pain further down the line.

Thanks for the help and thoughts, and good luck with 0.104. :)

-- 

73,
Ged.