Re:crontab bug?

[Siward <siward.via@freeler.nl>]

 Hi Daniel,

   you wrote : 
 When I edit my crontab (crontab -e) and then save it, it says normally that
 Processing '/etc/joe/editorrc'...done
 File /tmp/crontab.XXXXQMxjUM saved.
 But when the time has come, nothing happened. It did not start the command.  
 I have to type '/etc/init.d/cron restart' to make the updated crontab work. 
 It isn't normal I think,

 needing to restart cron for every new crontab isnt normal, no.
 so it may be a bug, or you are doing it wrong.

 did you read manpages for cron and crontab ?
 if they say this isnt how it's supposed to be, then it's a bug
   (either in documentation or in program, but a bug it is).

 cron maintainer likes to hear about bugs in cron.
 for this we have a 'Bug Tracking System'
 go see debian's website, goto bugtracking system,
   see if somebody else already reported this bug
   (and if so what cron maintainer's response was)
 if it was not yet reported, it could still be already fixed.
   to check this, you can
     either install latest version of cron from unstable and try that
     or read changelogs of latest cronpackage to see if it is mentioned there
 if it was not fixed, or fix not documented in changelog,
   then it is a bug that should be reported.

 to do this, you first collect some information to provide to maintainer :
    version of cron you tried,
    version of Debian you are running,
    exact and complete sequence of commands that produced incorrect behaviour.
    (if you dont supply this information,
     then neither mailinglist nor maintainer can find what went wrong)
 when you have these, you file a bug on cron (see debian website for that)

 this probably wont solve your problem very fast,
    but you'll be doing fellow Debian users a favor.

 Thanks!

 Siward