Re: Bug#391836: debian-policy: New virtual package: cron-daemon
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:
> I suggest, then, that we follow POSIX (please note that @reboot
> and @daily and other such convenient contractions are not mentioned in
> the standard, though cron(1) supports them):
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/crontab.html
> The important bits are extracted below. Should policy add
> support requirements for @reboot et al?
I suspect that we need to document that packages may rely on @reboot,
@yearly, @monthly, @weekly, @daily, and @hourly, and also on the */2
syntax. We also need to document that, contrary POSIX, files in
/etc/cron.d have seven fields instead of six, with the sixth field naming
the local user as which the cron job runs. That's a common error when
writing cron.d files.
Do both of our proposed cron daemons support that same syntax? (Does
anyone here use bcron to comment on that?)
> Given that, should this be duplicated in a normative section of
> policy? Or can we just vaguely hand wave the reader over to POSIX? Or
> add this as an informative footnote?
I would prefer to point people to POSIX but document the above exceptions,
similar to how we do for /bin/sh.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: