On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 20:50, Casey Price wrote:
In reality, most os' don't ship with any AV, thats the reason the AV companies make their money.
Arguably, its because OS vendors don't want to be in the AV business. Designing intelligent virus detection routines is a non-trivial task that never really ends. An AV suite is only as good as the viruses it detects, and keeping virus definition files current is vital. These reasons are why the major players in the AV space have almost exactly remained the same for the last 10 years (maybe longer?).
I think counting installation CDs is pointless. Media is cheap, disk is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, and they're only getting cheaper. We shouldn't use that as an excuse to bloat the distribution, but its not the right approach to come at it.
I think the Core should be a framework, containing the basic tools and technologies to cover the majority of general purpose uses. I think the Core is more than Base (bash, kernel, glibc, etc), but not much more than is needed for the user to use yum or up2date to customize it to their liking. Users want package availability with the click of a mouse, which is why Debian and Gentoo are so popular. We can spend the next 12 years trying to get consensus about where to draw the line, but I would rather just draw it and get down to building packages to populate Fedora Extras, so that someone can type "up2date clamav" and pull it out of a repository immediately after install.
Today its AV, tomorrow it will be foo, the day after that bar... lets just take what we've got, intelligently trim it down, and call it Core. Everything else is Extras.
~spot --- Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> LCA, RHCE Red Hat Sales Engineer || Aurora SPARC Linux Project Leader
"The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published." -- Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"