Bug#391836: debian-policy: New virtual package: cron-daemon

["Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org>]

Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Oct 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > > > Do both of our proposed cron daemons support that same syntax?  (Does
> > > > anyone here use bcron to comment on that?)
> > > bcron supports the */n syntax, but not @reboot and the other @*.  See
> > > http://manpages.debian.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=bcrontab&sektion=5
> > Hm.  I wonder how many packages that ship cron.d files expect the @* stuff
> > to work.  If none, then maybe we should document that packages shouldn't
> > rely on it.
> >
> > Everything other than @reboot is trivial to replace.  @reboot is a lot
> > trickier, although I suspect most packages use an init script.
>
> As a user, I got used to rely on @reboot to start services (like an irc
> proxy).
>
> And I have used it in packages (outside of Debian though) as well because
> init scripts are a pain nowadays compared to this simple solution (need to
> write meta-information to order the boot, etc).
>
> It would be nice if we could mandate its support.

But OTOH @reboot has a "feature" which could confuse users:
@reboot (on std cron) is called sometime earlier as expected in the
init.d sequence.
And I think the new dependency based init it could make it worse.

IMO I really think that packages should use the init.d script instead of
rely @reboot, allowing @reboot only for sysadmin: better to have a unique
method for "init.d"-like scripts, and to use the full features of new
booting system.
But in this case we doesn't need @reboot in the policy.

In the other case, I think we need to specify in policy when @reboot is
called, and which services should be available.

ciao
	cate

PS: priority of cron: S89 (old style) and "$remote_fs $syslog $time"
new style.