Re: [Rkhunter-users] Removal of '-r' and ROOTDIR options

[Bendtsen, J. <Jon...@la...>]

Hi

Since I'm probably already branded as an ungrateful bitch, I might as well continue with this email.

I think you guys made a mistake of giving the notice you did. 6 months on your own mailing list is not what I see elsewhere. The other times I've run into removal of features was in in programming languages, and they had it for a hole minor number, it was written in the documentation/man-page that in the future this feature would be removed. Further more I've seen messages in apache error log that in the future, from version Y, using feature X would no longer be possible. This gave sufficiently time to react, either by finding another web application, or changing the code in the web application if there was no other possibility and it was abandoned.



On 29/11/2012, at 17.04, <un...@hu...>
 wrote:

> On Thu, 29 Nov 2012 11:56:31 +0100 "Jon Bendtsen" 
> <Jon...@la...> wrote:
>> Your grace period for changes in the public "API" consisting of 
> command-line and config file options are too short. 
> 
> With nearly six months time between John's heads up and the release 
> of v1.4.0 I'd say your complaint is duly noted. However this 

How many mailing list subscribers do you have, compared to how many users are there all over the world? I was not subscribed before I actually ran into the problem that the feature I used was not working. It is the same thing with a lot of other tools I am using. Even those email lists that I am subscribed to, I do not always follow so close that I would have catches something like this. But I surely would have catched it in my log messages.

How many people has not discovered this yet, because they are still using the version from their linux distribution? which have not yet updated? How many people install by hand these days?


> doesn't change anything so, unless you or somebody else comes up 
> with sponsorship for the code, your only alternative is to hack the 
> code back in. (One search and replace action should cover about 
> ninety per cent of it.)

yeah, I hear you guys, maybe in spring 2013.


> As should be clear by now nobody has any time to spend on it which 
> makes one wonder what use discussing it any further could have.

Probably partly because I really do not think you gave enough notice, and since I used the feature to scan my servers, something which I can no longer do. I really do not see the need to remove a published feature that was working, okay, so maybe it did not cover 100% of the features that you wanted , but it was still working, and using it probably was no security risk, plus it could possibly perhaps maybe be used to catch compromised machines, because who can trust a tool running on an infected machine?


Also, partly because I hope that next time you give much longer notice, despite meeting an ungrateful bitch like me that complains over the free and gratis tool rkhunter that you guys give away.



JonB