On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 09:18:45AM +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote: > Raphael Hertzog wrote: >> On Wed, 14 Oct 2009, Russ Allbery wrote: >>>>> Do both of our proposed cron daemons support that same syntax? (Does >>>>> anyone here use bcron to comment on that?) >>>> bcron supports the */n syntax, but not @reboot and the other @*. See >>>> http://manpages.debian.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=bcrontab&sektion=5 >>> Hm. I wonder how many packages that ship cron.d files expect the @* stuff >>> to work. If none, then maybe we should document that packages shouldn't >>> rely on it. >>> >>> Everything other than @reboot is trivial to replace. @reboot is a lot >>> trickier, although I suspect most packages use an init script. >> >> As a user, I got used to rely on @reboot to start services (like an irc >> proxy). >> >> And I have used it in packages (outside of Debian though) as well because >> init scripts are a pain nowadays compared to this simple solution (need to >> write meta-information to order the boot, etc). >> >> It would be nice if we could mandate its support. > > But OTOH @reboot has a "feature" which could confuse users: > @reboot (on std cron) is called sometime earlier as expected in the > init.d sequence. > And I think the new dependency based init it could make it worse.
non-root users do not have much alternatives. > IMO I really think that packages should use the init.d script instead of > rely @reboot, allowing @reboot only for sysadmin: better to have a unique > method for "init.d"-like scripts, and to use the full features of new > booting system. > But in this case we doesn't need @reboot in the policy. I agree that packages should not use @reboot, and that therefore there is little point in mentionning it in policy. Cheers, -- Bill. <ballo...@debian.org> Imagine a large red swirl here. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
