Package: cron
Version: 3.0pl1-137
Followup-For: Bug #887035
X-Debbugs-Cc: Greek <greek64.m...@gmail.com>, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
<j...@debian.org>, Georges Khaznadar <georg...@debian.org>
Instead of patching cron, an easy way to get cron output to stdout is
to:
* rebuild it with debugging enabled:
$ apt-get source cron
$ apt-get build-dep cron
$ cd cron-3.0pl1
$ DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=debug dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
* use the undocumented `-x` option of Debian's cron to start it:
# cron -f -L 15 -x misc
(I found the `misc` debug log the most suiting)
* wrap the whole thing to redirect stderr to stdout:
$ cat run-cron
#!/bin/sh
exec cron -f -L 15 -x misc 2>&1
@Georges Khaznadar : what do you think about:
1. enabling debugging by default?
2. documenting `-x` ?
If Debian would enable the "debbugging feature" of its cron by default,
then this would add this overhead in a few places:
if ( (DebugFlags & (mask) ) ) printf message;
Since DebugFlags is 0 by default, this will ad an overhead of about two
machine instructions I guess to a few places, which is a neglible
waste/slowdown IMHO.
With the "debugging feature" enabled Debian's cron will gain the very
nice features:
a) for the sysadmin to be able to debug what cron is doing and why and
b) use the sysadmin being able to use Debian's cron in docker and kubernetes.
IMHO a huge gain that costs nothing.
?
*t
-- Package-specific info:
--- EDITOR:
--- /usr/bin/editor:
/usr/bin/vim.gtk3
--- /usr/bin/crontab:
-rwxr-sr-x 1 root crontab 43568 Feb 22 2021 /usr/bin/crontab
--- /var/spool/cron:
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 10 2021 /var/spool/cron
--- /var/spool/cron/crontabs:
drwx-wx--T 2 root crontab 4096 Feb 22 2021 /var/spool/cron/crontabs
--- /etc/cron.d:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 22 15:03 /etc/cron.d
--- /etc/cron.daily:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 11 09:33 /etc/cron.daily
--- /etc/cron.hourly:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 10 2021 /etc/cron.hourly
--- /etc/cron.monthly:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 10 2021 /etc/cron.monthly
--- /etc/cron.weekly:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 10 2021 /etc/cron.weekly
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.4
APT prefers stable-security
APT policy: (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-16-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=de_CH.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_CH.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=de_CH:de
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
Versions of packages cron depends on:
ii adduser 3.118
ii debianutils 4.11.2
ii init-system-helpers 1.60
ii libc6 2.31-13+deb11u3
ii libpam-runtime 1.4.0-9+deb11u1
ii libpam0g 1.4.0-9+deb11u1
ii libselinux1 3.1-3
ii lsb-base 11.1.0
ii sensible-utils 0.0.14
Versions of packages cron recommends:
ii msmtp-mta [mail-transport-agent] 1.8.11-2.1
Versions of packages cron suggests:
ii anacron 2.3-30
pn checksecurity <none>
ii logrotate 3.18.0-2+deb11u1
Versions of packages cron is related to:
pn libnss-ldap <none>
pn libnss-ldapd <none>
pn libpam-ldap <none>
pn libpam-mount <none>
pn nis <none>
pn nscd <none>
-- no debconf information
