[Pkg-clamav-devel] Bug#577499: Bug#577499: clamav-daemon will not start, even when purged and reinstalled

[Stephen Gran]

This one time, at band camp, Dr A. J. Trickett said:
> Okay, I purged my database of sane security filters and other stuff, and it 
> reloaded okay. I then added back just a fresh set of sane security filters and 
> it also restarted. I don't know if it was an old/broken filter set that was 
> the problem or it was just on the knife edge for memory but it is working at 
> the moment.

Great, I'm glad it's working for you.  Hopefully it will stay working,
but if not, you at least know where to start looking for next time.

> Regarding the bug, I don't know what to say, other than perhaps the package 
> documentation should say you need plenty of RAM and and it may not be 
> appropriate for people using a VM with only limited RAM.

Would it be ok with you if we just made the error message slightly more
helpful?  I'd imagine something like: "daemonize() failed: No more
memory" would be more helpful than just the current "daemonize()
failed".

I'm a little leery of putting it in the package description because the
memory usage of clamav is fairly fluid across versions and also heavily
dependant on things like extra signatures, as you've seen.  I don't want
to let something like that bitrot and scare people off if upstream comes
up with a more memory efficient way of signature loading, for example.

> Thanks for taking the time to respond and help me fix my problem, I only wish 
> every package maintainer was as helpful.

I wish every bug was this easy and every bug reporter answered as
promptly as you :)

Cheers,
-- 
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|   ,''`.                                            Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :                                        sgran at debian.org |
|  `. `'                        Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-                                     http://www.debian.org |
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