-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 2013-06-07 15:55, Saint Germain wrote: > On 5 June 2013 23:34, Christian Kastner <deb...@kvr.at> wrote: >> On 2013-06-05 13:12, Saint Germain wrote: >>>>> Indeed even if cron has nothing to do, a temporary file is >>>>> always created in /tmp and immediatly deleted. >> >> So another workaround for you would be to comment out the hourly >> stanza from /etc/crontab. >> >> Any other solution would be overly complex to implement, I'm >> afraid. > > Ok I haven't carefully read the commit, so I didn't understand why > this file creation was necessary in the first place (and why other > distro don't have this behavior).
To prevent data loss. Summarized: one of cron's features is the mailing of output. "Regular" cron connects to the MTA, runs the job and pipes its output to the MTA. However, some MTAs time out if they don't receive input within a certain amount of time, resulting in the output not being sent by mail, resulting in data loss (see bugs #155109, #443615). With the patch, we write to a tmpfile and only connect to the MTA when the job is finished, thereby preventing this possible data loss. > If mounting /tmp on a tmpfs as a workaround is acceptable, > probably that creating the temporary file directly in RAM would > also be acceptable ? That came to my mind as a possible solution, too. The problem is we don't know how much RAM we might have available (think embedded systems), so consuming possibly large amounts of it periodicalyly may result in Bad Stuff(tm) happening to the system. An alternative could be to control this behaviour (pipe to MTA directly vs pipe to tmpfile) via a command-line flag. > Hum, that is a very hot question that was discussed many many > times: http://lwn.net/Articles/499534/ > > I think it is better to avoid discussing too much this particular > hot topic "/tmp on tmpfs". ;-) Good point :-) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAlG0k6oACgkQwSyarY0epjXVlgCfS089H4fOvWeTWOQ7Wm53ALBv /B4AnjGRYT7jyXeLVw7nHx7UOcBGNrXA =seE+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
