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Re: cron jobs more often than daily



On Tue, 6 Jan 1998, Hamish Moffatt wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 05, 1998 at 11:58:12PM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> > Urgh, I hate it already. Can somebody post a rationale for
> > the section of policy quoted above? I notice that mgetty
> > has added faxrunq to my /etc/crontab on my bo system.

The idea behind the policy is explained in `3.3.7 Configuration files'. As
/etc/crontab is a configuration file of the "cron" package, no other
package may touch it. That's because in the past, we had packages that
messed around with other packages configuration files.

The solution presented in 3.3.7 is that the "owner" of the conffile (cron
in that case) provides a utility (like install-info, for example) through
which other packages can register and remove cron jobs.

I suggest you file a "wish-list" bug report against "cron". You can refer
to me, if you want.

> In fact, mgetty-fax's postinst said the modification of /etc/crontab was
> done automatically by debstd! 

Yeah, this is one of the biggest lies: "debstd". Please let me say this
very loud again:

      debstd does _NOT_ stand for DEBIAN STANDARD, it stands for
      CL's interpretation of the DEBIAN STANDARD, which often differs
      from the policy

Thus, the use of debstd is depreciated. Note, that I've removed debstd
from all of my packages lately and would like to see others doing the same
thing. As soon as we have the macro-utility (was it called automake?) set
up, we should consider removing debstd.

> Perhaps my mistake was using debhelper; if I use debstd, I can reassign
> any bugs filed against my package for modifying /etc/crontab to debstd
> :-) 

Yes, please file bug reports against debstd. 

Note, that I don't know if debhelper is any better regarding the cron
policy--I hope so.


Thanks,

Chris

--                 Christian Schwarz
                    schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
Don't know Perl?     schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
      
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http://www.perl.com     http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/


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