Re: Ghost cronjob

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Tue 04 May 2021 at 22:20:14 (+0300), Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> On Ma, 04 mai 21, 19:50:27, Mart van de Wege wrote:
> > David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> writes:
> > > On Tue 04 May 2021 at 17:06:50 (+0200), Mart van de Wege wrote:
> > >> 
> > >> Surely packaging a system timer file like that should not be done? It
> > >> should be at the discretion of the admin to create one if they want to
> > >> run btrbk on a schedule.
> > >
> > > I think this has been discussed in the past, and that installing a
> > > package is generally seen as meaning that you want it to run: Debian
> > > therefore tries to supply a reasonable and secure configuration.
> > >
> > But that's not applicable in this case. btrbk can be run standalone or
> > from a cronjob/timer, but the exact time someone wants to run their
> > backups, or even if they want them run periodically at all, is not a
> > decision you can make for them.
> > 
> > Of course an argument can be made that without edits to the default
> > btrbk.conf file btrbk won't run anyway, so configuring the timer is part
> > of configuring your backup strategy. I still think that supplying a
> > system timer is wrong here.
> 
> Feel free to contact the Maintainer about it.
> 
> In any case, it probably makes sense to at least mention this in 
> NEWS.Debian, especially if the package previously shipped a cron job.

AIUI the version in stretch is Debian's first appearance, so it came
with systemd rather than cron.

Reading README.md,

   "btrbk is designed to run as a cron job for triggering periodic
    snapshots and backups, as well as from the command line (e.g. for
    instantly creating additional snapshots)"

I would have thought that btrbk was really designed for frequent and
regular backups, eg even hourly (hence all the discussion about
timestamps, and how they interact with timezones and with concurrent
daily backups). Wouldn't that make a systemd timer a reasonable
default to supply. After all, it's easy to override it with

  # ln -s /dev/null /etc/systemd/system/btrbk.service

Cheers,
David.