On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 04:45:26PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >> Are there any seconds to the proposal to create a virtual
> >> package cron-daemon? The rationale is for packages like logratate,
> >> which otherwise would need to depend on cron | anacron | fcron | bcron |
> >> etc.
> > Given how anacron works, I think it fails almost all of the
> > requirements below, so should not be eligible to declare this virtual
> > package. fcron's Conflicts / description suggest it may have a
> > similar problem. Is this virtual package still useful in that case?
> Hmm. You do have a point. However, the original use case was
> for a package to be able to have it's log files rotated periodically,
> and by that criteria cron, anacron, fcron, and bcron do fit the bill.
fcron doesn't appear to run cron.daily by default, and neither does bcron.
*Only* the cron package ships a crontab that runs /etc/cron.daily by
default; anacron also supports running cron.daily, but relies on cron itself
to trigger it on a daily basis. (Without cron installed, anacron will only
rotate logs when you reboot.)
I don't think we should relax the requirements when that still only leaves
us one package that satisfies them. Instead, we ought to make sure that we
have a set of requirements that make sense for what the reverse-dependencies
need, and withhold use of a virtual package until there's more than one
package actually meeting those requirements.
> I think perhaps we need to pare down the requirements (and
> perhaps change the name of the virtual package), so that packages that
> just want a periodic job scheduler don't have to specify a list of
> matching providers.
> Requirements:
> 1) Be able to run a batch job periodically.
> 2) Correct execution of /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly}
[...]
Anacron will always fail the /etc/cron.hourly requirement, too...
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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