[clamav-users] Future support of clamav in EPEL7 and EPEL8

[Scott Kitterman]

On February 18, 2023 10:40:55 PM UTC, Orion Poplawski via clamav-users <clamav-users at lists.clamav.net> wrote:
>I'm one of the maintainers of the clamav package in Fedora and Fedora EPEL.  I believe that the EPEL packages are currently one of the primary sources for users of clamav on RHEL based distributions.
>
>We were recently asked about the future of support for clamav in EL7 in particular[1] since https://docs.clamav.net/faq/faq-eol.html states that the 0.103.X release series will go EOL on Sep-14 2023.  This is prior to the EOL date for EL7 of Jun-30 2024, and much before the EOL date for EL8 of May 31, 2029. (See https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata)
>
>This email is to start a discussion of what will happen with clamav support in EPEL7 and EPEL8.  In particular, to inform everyone that it will be impossible to build clamav 1.X in EPEL7 and EPEL8 due to lack of rust support.  Fedora packaging policies prohibit the downloading of files from the internet during builds, and the rust/rpm versions in EL7/EL8 are too old to support the current Fedora rust ecosystem.
>
>Perhaps this will not be an issue and people can simply start using the RPMs provided by clamav upstream.
>
>We might be able to provide a version of the Fedora EPEL clamav RPMs via COPR[2], as COPR does not have the restrictions on internet downloads. However, it won't have the "EPEL" appellation.
>
>I am hopeful that we will be able to provide clamav 1.X in EPEL9.
>
>[1] - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2170297#c3
>[2] - https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/

Although I don't know precisely when mainline support for the current Debian stable release will end (it's a year after the next release, which will be when it's ready), we will have a similar situation for support for our current stable release (Bullseye).

The following release (Bookworm) has 1.0, so it should be okay for at least awhile.

Is there any chance Cisco would consider an extension for the support period?  If you could extend it to align to the EL7 end date that would really help us too.

Scott K