[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#484014: This is a local policy decision

[Micah Anderson]

severity 484014 wishlist
tag 484014 +wontfix
thanks

Hi there,

>  a statement like
>    cron { foo:
>      ...
>    } 
>
>  adds lines to root's crontab. On Debian, it should be using
>  /etc/cron.d for this!


Its my understanding, which could of course be flawed, that there is no
explicitly defined policy about crontabs. I could it documented anywhere
when you should use root's crontab over using /etc/cron.d, over using
/etc/crontab.

After taking an informal poll on #debian-devel the answer seems to be
that this is a policy decision, but its normal to assume that packages
should only ever use /etc/cron.{d,daily,hourly,monthly,weekly} and that
users/admins should not use these and instead prefer user crontabs. The
reason would be that packages might clobber files you install in these
directories.

You could of course make them 'local-foo', or even 'puppet-foo' in this
case. Others resonded that 'system related cronjobs, like monitoring
things, go into /etc/cron.* and user related things to the user's
crontabs. 

In the end, I think that this is a locally-defined policy that you have
to decide. In this case, puppet upstream has defined a policy for this,
which seems to be at odds with how you prefer it.

Browsing the upstream puppet bugs about these issues, I see
http://projects.reductivelabs.com/issues/show/746 which describes a
similar request, and the solution is not trivial:

	You would need to create a new provider for managing /etc/crontab. It
	might seem minimal, but managing cron jobs has turned out to be
	one of the most complicated types in Puppet.

So it appears that this would require pretty significant upstream code
change to modify the existing crontab provider to support a different
format. 

micah
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