Re: Updating scanners and filters in Debian stable (3.1)

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

Jesus Climent <jesus.climent@hispalinux.es> writes:

> Because ssh-from-woody-plus-security-updates is not as useless as
> spamassassin-from-woody-which-has-changed-so-much-that-is-impossible-to-backport-anything?

It seems to me that "impossible" is being used in a strange sense
here.

Part of maintaining a virus scanner may well include backporting
things, and that may be a fair bit of work to do.  There are
mechanisms within Debian for soliciting help for such tasks, or
perhaps there is no one willing to do the task.  

But that doesn't mean the task is *impossible*, nor does it mean that
because we don't have anyone who wants to do it right, we should do it
wrongly instead.

The virus-scanner folks seem to insist that keeping abreast of the
latest virus definitions is very important.  I'm inclined to agree.
But that doesn't mean that stability has become less important, it
just means that making a good stable virus-scanner package is hard,
and involves more work than just compiling the latest thing from
upstream.  

It is certainly not "impossible"; it is at worst merely hard.

Thomas