Hi, In the past years, I have done quite a bit of work with virus scanners on Linux. The company I used to work for has funded most of amavis-ng development before being borged. In the past years, I have found it annoying that the eicar anti-virus testfile is not available as aptable Debian package.
Since eicar.com has no license and eicar doesn't seem to be interested in clarifying its license, inclusion of the eicar test string in Debian proper is out of the question, even for non-free. But it is possible to have an eicar-installer package in contrib which is itself dfsg-free and downloads the non-free eicar test string from the Web on installation. After having that installer package rejected by ftpmaster (doesn't make sense to have a 3 KB installer package to install a hundred bytes of code) and been encouraged to take that issue to -devel, I would like to hear other people's opinions. It is my opinion that it would be a good idea to have that installer package in Debian. Heck, if I wouldn't have that opinion, I wouldn't have spent some of my time to build that package. Additionally, I would like to seriously propose establishing a pre-upload interface to ftpmaster so that a developer could learn that he is writing a package pending rejection after upload _before_ spending time on building that package. I find it disturbingly impolite to say "sorry, we don't want your volunteer work" _after_ the work has been done. Especially if it is done in Mr. Troup's usual "why did you bother me in the first place, mere mortal" style. Greetings Marc, somewhat mad at the moment -- -------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! ----- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Karlsruhe, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " | Fon: *49 721 966 32 15 Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fax: *49 721 966 31 29