Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2803 mails)

[Jim Henderson <hendersj@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:00:47 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:

> > That resolves any issue with executable viruses.  OK, so how about
> > macro viruses?
>
> Samething. Scan on download. Or have scan on load on the program
> executing the macro.

Yeah, so an extra layer in the application rather than have it done one 
way at the OS level.  I can't see that making sense - it's like saying 
"every download manager ever created must have built-in virus scanning".  
Why reinvent the wheel in each application?  I thought one of the 
benefits of using *nix systems in general was that things tend to be 
built on special-purpose components.  Like Mandvd, it doesn't reimplement 
ffmpeg/mplayer/transcode, it calls them.  It doesn't implement its own 
DVD authoring suite, it uses dvdauthor.

The whole idea of most application development in Linux seems to me to be 
code reuse and not making every application implement its own way of 
doing things.

I'm just really puzzled by this attitude that each application should 
implement its own virus scanning - that seems so antithetical to the 
whole idea of how programs are developed on the platform.

> I certainly do not want scan on read on every single file in my system.
> Not in Linux. That's one of the reasons I use Linux: I do not need it.

Well, sure, that's also a reason I use Linux.  But you and I are *smart* 
users.  Not all users have our saavy.  As the Linux user base grows, the 
average level of expertise the user has is going to drop farther and 
farther.

Jim
-- 
 Jim Henderson
 Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits

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