Marking files in /etc/cron.* as %config

nodata lsof at nodata.co.uk
Sun Mar 16 14:12:50 UTC 2008


Am Sonntag, den 16.03.2008, 10:57 +0000 schrieb Tim Jackson:
> In the awstats package we have a cron.hourly script which updates 
> statistics. It's currently (intentionally on the part of the Fedora 
> maintainer Aurelien) marked as %config(noreplace), on the basis that users 
> expect to be able to edit these scripts and don't expect RPMs to clobber 
> them. I noticed today that rpmlint complains about this:
> 
> awstats.noarch: E: executable-marked-as-config-file /etc/cron.hourly/awstats
> 
> I had a look in the guidelines and couldn't see anything explicit about 
> this case. I can see the arguments both ways. Personally I generally leave 
> RPM-installed /etc/cron.* scripts alone where I can, and install my own 
> ones if I want to do something different. However I can see that not 
> everyone would do that. Additionally, there is the complication that (as 
> with awstats) people might not like the default functionality (e.g. they 
> might want to update their stats every day, not every hour).
> 
> One way of solving this would be to do it in a similar way to how we do 
> init scripts e.g. have /etc/sysconfig/awstats with:
> 
> UPDATEFREQ=hourly|daily|none
> 
> and have the default-installed cron.* scripts act accordingly.
> 
> Alternatively, clamav drops a crontab file into /etc/cron.d which in turn 
> calls an update script. Since this is not an executable, rpmlint won't 
> complain.
> 
> Any comments? I think we should cover this in the guidelines.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Tim

Last time I looked, and this was on Debian, awstats does not process all
awstats config files. You have to call another perl script to do that.

If this is true for fedora, awstats is quite unique in that you MUST
write your own cron script, and so all the traditional thinking goes out
of the window.




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