[Fedora-packaging] Packaging guidelines for packaging Cron Jobs in the distribution

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 02/25/2013 12:40 PM, Marcela Mašláňová wrote:
> On 02/25/2013 12:41 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
>> Greetings
>>
>> I have been looking into cron jobs in the distribution and I noticed
>> that there dont seem to be any packaging guidelines for packaging cron
>> jobs in the distribution.
>>
>> More or less every package that ships cron jobs does not require Cronie
>> which arguably it should, however only few packages actually strictly
>> need cron ( logwatch,leafnote etc ) while the majority of them are more
>> or less small administration task that can be triggered manually by the
>> user/administrator thus not strictly required by the component.
>>
>> Before I start providing patches to fix this I need to know what is the
>> correct way to move forward as in...
>>
>> Should the requirement on Cronie be added to the spec file?
>>
>> or
>>
>> Should those cron-jobs be package in a separate sub package which would
>> depend on Cronie?
>>
>> Thanks
>>              JBG
>> -- 
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>> packaging at lists.fedoraproject.org
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>
> We have more cron implementation. Correctly should all packages 
> require dailyjobs or /etc/cron.d if they want to run cronjob by cronie 
> or fcron. Other packages usually don't mention dependencies from core 
> installation like cron, syslog, etc. because they incorrectly believe 
> they will be always there.

Agreed affected components for cron are just around the 100 mark while 
rsyslog or syslog-ng ones are around 600

> Which patches do you want to provide? We have a planning process for 
> wide system changes.

This is not what I consider system wide change *unless* fpc would decide 
it should be package in a separated subpackage which means change in 
usage behavior and users would have to install that subpackage to get 
the previous behavior so our opinion of it being systemd wide might 
differ in that regard.

It would only be one line changes to packages spec files that put cron 
jobs in the cron directory as in a requirement on cronie which is 
currently lacking and should have been fixed/done when it was decided 
for it to be the default by it's maintainer and or fpc with guidelines 
and the relevant maintainers themselves .

And as far as I know we neither ship dcron nor vixie-cron which are the 
other ones that provide a crond daemon binary so I'm not sure how or why 
fcron is relative to this discussion.

In anycase we first need to settle on the proper way forward for the 
affected components before I start working on something so my efforts 
wont be in vain because it was decide to do something else.

JBG