> I have to admit that personally, I'm more concerned about jobs running
> twice than not at all. Your method helps people who go around and
> disable by hand the package rather than un-installing, but makes it
> worse for _everyone_ who has anacron installed and actually uses it.
> We can't keep going alont this way. What if someone modifies their
> crontab to not run cron.daily? That's going to cause breakage too. We
> have to decide a point past which it's not worth trying to fix the
> problems that are caused by the users disabling system tools.
You're right. Debian doesn't seem to provide any officially sanctioned way to
disable startup services (like Red Hat's chkconfig). This being so, disabling
services "by hand" should probably be considered "unsupported behavior":
people who do it (like me) must suffer the consequences. (It would be nice if
a future release of Debian supported this, thru a chkconfig-like program.)
For now, it would be better if cron could determine whether anacron is being
started in the current runlevel, instead of relying on roundabout solutions
like 'test -x /usr/sbin/anacron' or 'pidof anacron'. (It seems that trying to
let cron be ignorant of anacron won't work.) A possible solution would be
the following /etc/crontab (though I hate relying on an external script):
-----CUT-----
# /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab
# Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab'
# command to install the new version when you edit this file.
# This file also has a username field, that none of the other crontabs do.
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
# m h dom mon dow user command
17 * * * * root run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6 * * * root chkservice anacron || run-parts
--report /etc/cron.daily
47 6 * * 7 root chkservice anacron || run-parts
--report /etc/cron.weekly
52 6 1 * * root chkservice anacron || run-parts
--report /etc/cron.monthly
#
-----CUT-----
Where chkservice is a script like this:
-----CUT-----
#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$1" -o "$1" = -h -o "$1" = --help ]; then
echo "Usage: chkservice [SERVICENAME]"
echo "Check whether a service will run in the current runlevel"
else
runlevels=(`/sbin/runlevel`)
current=${runlevels[1]}
if [ -e "/etc/rc$current.d/S??$1" ]; then
exit 0
else
exit 1
fi
fi
-----CUT-----
Note: cron apparently makes empty environments for its children. If you could
get the $RUNLEVEL env variable (mentioned by `man runlevel`) to be inherited,
you could eliminate chkservice and just use lines like this:
25 6 * * * root test [ -e "/etc/rc$RUNLEVEL.d/S??anacron" || run-parts
--report /etc/cron.daily
Summary: I understand why you have things the way they are. It's not perfect,
but it may well be the best. (Standard disclaimers about non-ideal world
apply.)
--
joel
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