Re: Announcing bcron version 0.08

On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 07:24:03PM -0600, Bruce Guenter wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 11:33:45AM +0000, Gerrit Pape wrote:
> > This is nice.  I started working on integrating it into Debian to
> > replace the default cron package, and all works out well so far.
> 
> Great.  Please keep me posted.

I got some input after announcing my intent to package bcron for Debian,
and'll try to coordinate with the maintainer of the default Debian cron
package to support smoothly switching from cron to bcron and vice versa,
should work well.  There also already have been two feature requests ;-)
see
 http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/04/threads.html#00280

We have a namespace restriction for files in /etc/cron.d/ in Debian, and
bcron-update will be patched accordingly to ignore files with names not
in this namespace.

Finally I need to alter the configuration steps outlined in your README.
The Debian 'at' package puts its spool into /var/spool/cron/, and
handles the files in there as user 'daemon', this doesn't work with the
restricted permissions on the /var/spool/cron/ directory you suggest.

So instead of
  chown cron:cron /var/spool/cron /var/spool/cron/*
  chmod go-rwx /var/spool/cron /var/spool/cron/*

the bcron-run Debian package will set these permissions
  for i in crontabs tmp trigger; do
    chown cron:cron /var/spool/cron/$i
    chmod go-rwx /var/spool/cron/$i
  done
  for i in `ls -1 /var/spool/cron/crontabs/ || :`; do
    chown cron:cron /var/spool/cron/crontabs/$i
  done

/var/spool/cron/ will be root:root and mode 0755, do you see any problem
with this?

> > I'm not that confident with the bcron-spool socket by default being
> > /tmp/.bcron-spool, I think /var/run/.bcron-spool would be better.
> 
> I personally don't like /var/run, but I agree that /tmp is suboptimal.
> Is there any kind of standard for named pipes, or other packages to
> compare with?  I will note that quite a number of packages already use
> /tmp for this purpose (X11, ORBit, gdm, xfs, ssh-agent).

Debian adheres to the FHS as standard for placing files into the
filesystem, and AIUI the FHS suggests /var/run/, see
 http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.2/fhs-5.13.html

I don't really have a personal opinion of this, other than, as you said,
/tmp/ as a world-writable directory seems suboptimal.

Regards, Gerrit.