RPM dependency on cron

[Panu Matilainen]

On Fri, 6 Nov 2009, Benny Amorsen wrote:

> We have a lot of virtualized (OpenVZ) Fedora servers. Until now I have
> avoided running cron inside each server; log rotation is done from the
> host.
>
> This has worked rather well until lately. Unfortunately rpm has acquired
> a dependency on crontabs, because it adds a file to /etc/cron.daily. In
> turn, crontabs depends on /etc/cron.d, which is provided by cronie.
> cronie explicitly depends on anacron. And thus, anacron and cronie are
> required for all Fedora installations.
>
> The really nasty thing is that cronie turns itself on when installed! I
> suddenly had an extra logrotate running which rotated logs in a way not
> consistent with our policy.
>
> I'm not sure where it's easiest to cut this chain. I'd be tempted to
> make crontabs provide /etc/cron.d and make cronie depend on crontabs.
> That way rpm would pull in crontabs but nothing more.

In Fedra >= 12 the cronjob was split to a separate subpackage to avoid 
this dependency chain on minimal installs: 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=500722

Doing that as F11 update is not really an option though.

 	- Panu -