Re: Announcing bcron version 0.08

On Sat, Apr 09, 2005 at 10:37:19AM +0000, Gerrit Pape wrote:
>   There also already have been two feature requests ;-)
> see
>  http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/04/threads.html#00280

What is being referred to by "fcron-like functionality", and when does
@reboot trigger?  I don't think I very much like the idea of making cron
both a service manager and a scheduler.  There are other ways of doing
that, and the modes of operation should be seperated.

> 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.

Is it simply a matter of ignoring dotfiles, or something more?

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

Shouldn't be a problem.  The tools only write files into crontabs and
tmp.  I can drop the permissions restrictions on the /var/spool/cron/
directory itself, as long as the other directories are restricted.

On the list of things to do is to pre-parse crontabs into a "bcrontabs"
directory.  There are no efficiency reasons for doing so, but it does
increase security (by taking the parsing out of the scheduler) and
reliability (by allowing for reporting of parsing errors early in the
process).

> 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

Ah, and there it is:
	Programs that maintain transient UNIX-domain sockets must place
	them in this directory.
Of course, calling them transient is confusing to me -- the sockets are
permanent, as long as bcron-spool is running.
-- 
Bruce Guenter <[email protected]> http://em.ca/~bruceg/ http://untroubled.org/
OpenPGP key: 699980E8 / D0B7 C8DD 365D A395 29DA  2E2A E96F B2DC 6999 80E8

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFCZp5I6W+y3GmZgOgRAuGPAJ9doxjYt4/LzgqnOBpe/n/lMfbg/wCfbNRa
8PVI4cNdiJwjHlfdYDWhQXw=
=BJyW
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----