[request-tracker-maintainers] Bug#602570: Bug#602570: Bug#602570: fails to install because of /etc/cron.d/ missing

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Sun, Nov 07, 2010 at 05:05:45PM +0100, Daniel Baumann wrote:
> On 11/07/2010 04:21 PM, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> > Hi Daniel,
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > Thinking over this again, I'm curious as to why you think RT shouldn't
> > depend on cron (or most likely the virtual package cron-daemon).
> 
> you (the maintaienrs) didn't depend on it in the first place and added a
> debconf question to ask whetever cron jobs should be installed or not.

Yes, I think that was an oversight and I'm glad that you've brought it
to our attention :)

> i can't tell if that is a useful thing to have.
> 
> however, assuming that this was done on purpose and therefore the
> cronjobs are sort of optional, request-tracker should not depend on cron
> in order to not inflate depends. a recommends looks like the right thing
> then. what i wanted to express was that i did not think of solving the
> bug by adding a depends to cron, as it's too intrusive, but rather just
> make the installation not fail.

Yes, that makes sense, thanks. It's probably somewhat debatable whether
the cron jobs should be optional at all; I think any working installation
of RT should have them enabled. However when setting up test environments
it's often desirable not to have the cron job enabled.

> > Part
> > of the functionality of RT won't work unless cron is installed. Wouldn't
> > it be less confusing for users to pull in cron? Since it's a
> > user-selectable feature, perhaps a Recommends would be strong enough.
> 
> sounds like the most flexible and most usefull one. as you certainly
> know, adding the recommends will not fix the bug, the mkdir is still
> required (as, even if it's not the default behaviour, it's a valid
> setting of disabling automatic installation of recommended packages in
> apt/aptitude, and any package must not fail installing when doing so).

Indeed so. I think adding a Recommends: cron-daemon is probably the
best thing to do at this stage and I'll do that as part of fixing this
bug.

Thanks for your input.

Dominic.

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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