V4 [Partial withdrawal of PROPOSAL] Change Chapter 17 (cron)

[Johannes Poehlmann <johannes@caldera.de>]

1.         We want to uphold one part of the proposal, which was already
           sent out separately:
                Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2000 16:02:25 +0100
                From: Johannes Poehlmann <johannes@caldera.de>
                To: lsb-spec@lists.linuxbase.org
                Subject: [PROPOSAL] Get rid of the cron.hourly dir
                Message-ID: <20001207160225.A11177@caldera.de>

        Our reasons are: 
        o because many parallel cron scripts cause a big computational load, 
          it should be possible to serialize these scripts. 
          This would be risky when using cron.hourly: 
          What if the serialized scripts need more time then one hour ?
        o we want to allow cron to optimize away hourly disk accesses, 
          as vixie-cron with a patch from debian already does.
        o implementing anacron-like functionality produces unnecessary 
          overhead if cron.hourly is in place (or the anacron-like 
          functionality had to be switched off for cron.hourly resulting
          in inconsistent behaviour).

2.      As a consensus could not be reached, we do withdraw the rest of 
        the mentioned proposal. Instead we propose to legalize our proposed 
        concept (using symbolic links to a common scripts repository)
        as we would not like to give it up for Caldera OpenLinux.

     proposed new (and shorter ..) wording:

        The directories /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly, /etc/cron.monthly 
        may also contain soft links to a centralized scripts repository. 
        If existing, this directory has to be named /etc/cron.scripts. 

--------
Task for the proposal
http://sourceforge.net/pm/task.php?func=detailtask&project_task_id=18043&group_id=1107&group_project_id=3049

http://lists.debian.org/lsb-spec-0008/msg00000.html 

lsb-spec mailing list: <20000801154116.A15227@caldera.de>

On Tue, Aug 01, 2000 at 03:41:59PM +0200, Johannes Poehlmann wrote:

> This Proposal is a repost of "Comments on Chapter 17 (cron) 
> of the LSB Spec", sent out 2000 June 12 to the lsb-spec list 
> 
> =============================================
> 
>         PROPOSAL to change Chapter 17 of the LSB Spec:
> 
>   common script repository, init-like symlinks, directory naming
> 
>
> 
> 1 It is desirable to control the order of execution of the scripts
>   put in one of the "periodic scripts directories" ( /etc/cron.daily etc.).
> 
>   This can be done by adapting the naming scheme used inside   
>   of /etc/init.d, using two digit prefixes, which control the order 
>   of execution.
> 
> 2 It should be possible for the local sysadmin to move the scripts from 
>   one "periodic scripts dir." to one other, to control frequency of execution.
> 
> 3. Both requirements 1. and 2. make it difficult for package managers to
>    cleanly remove or update because the script names and path can change.
> 
> 4. This is why Caldera uses a common cron script repository 
>    (/etc/cron.d/lib in OpenLinux 2.4) and uses soft links to these
>    repository from the periodic scripts directories. (modeled
>    after /etc/init.d/) The soft links must be named XXname, where
>    XX is 2 digits and name is the name of the script pointed to.
> 
>    Example: /etc/cron.d/Daily/40cleandir ->../lib/cleandir
> 
>    The local system administrator now can rename and move these
>    soft links inside the periodic scripts directories, but the
>    package manager can get the information which soft links point
>    to which script. As the scripts are part of a package, the
>    package manager could completely control these soft links.
>  
> 5. /etc Name space pollution
> 
>    The actual proposal enforces 5 cron related directories in /etc.
>    (Or even 6 if our cron script repository idea is used). This can
>    get even worse, if somebody wishes more periodic scripts directories,
>    say /etc/cron.biweekly.
> 
>    This is why we propose to keep the historical place /etc/cron.d/
>    and put the following directories inside:
> 
>    /etc/cron.d/
>               ¦
>               +-Monthly  periodic scripts directories (Capitalized Names)
>               +-Weekly
>               +-Daily
>               +-Hourly
>               +-[A-Z]*   more periodic scripts directories allowed
>               | 
>               +-scripts  cron scripts repository
>               +-tabs     cron tab snippets dropped by packages 
>                          ( is /etc/cron.d in the lsb-spec )
> 

----- End forwarded message -----

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 ==== /____/ =====   Dipl. Inf. Johannes Poehlmann, mail: jhp@caldera.de
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