Resolution of the cron.hourly directory

[tytso@mit.edu]

One of my action items was to resolve the questions surrounding the
cron.hourly directory.

After looking at all of the issues, it seems that the most simply way of
dealing with the issue, at least for now, is to remove mention of the
cron.hourly directory from the specification.  Distributions can of
course still provide such a directory, but LSB-compliant applications
should use a file in /etc/cron.d instead.

It is true that cron.hourly is very useful, and a number of applications
will want to use it.  However the existence of the /etc/cron.d file
means that there is a relatively simple way of providing the desired
functionality.  

The issues which Johannes Poehlmann from Caldera brought up (disk
accesses causing disk spinups on laptops every hour, inconsistencies
regarding whether anacron applies to all cron.* directories, and large
numbers of scripts in cron.hourly taking more than an hour to run) can
all be addressed by some clever coding, but this code does not exist
today.  In addition, a number of distributions don't support cron.hourly
today; while all do support /etc/cron.d.

When this is weighed against the observation that there is an entry in
/etc/cron.d easily replaces the functionality provided by cron.hourly,
it becomes very hard to justify leaving cron.hourly in the LSB
specification.  Hence, I've removed it.  Of course, distributions who
wish to continue providing cron.hourly are free to do so; LSB compliant
applications should use /etc/cron.d instead, however.

Comments?

							- Ted