Rex Dieter wrote:
Matthew Woehlke wrote:
Christoph � wrote:
I really hope I'm missing something...
calm down! No one will break your system. In the worst case you would
simply have to enable sendmail.
Ah... yeah. Good thing I read fedora-devel then, yes?
</sarcasm>
If an upgrade makes cron jobs stop working,
Upgrades not affected, only new installs.
That's good, but...
or a new F10 system allows
creating cron jobs that won't run
jobs still (should!) run, there's just no target for the cron notification
mails to land.
...I still feel that this is a problem. Scenario:
I'm Joe User. I use cron+rsync to do nightly backups and keep my home on
a separate partition (so I'm somewhere in the "power user" category, but
I don't read fedora-devel). I just upgraded to F10 (F11?) by doing a
clean install. I didn't read the release notes (yeah, we know the joke,
"who does?"). I reloaded my crontab with my backup script (only
generates output, hence mail, if an error occurs), and go on with life.
Probably I'll notice that I'm not getting any mail and take it as a good
sign (in fact, everyting /is/ working perfectly right now). Some time
later, the job starts failing, but since I didn't know I had to install
sendmail, the error is sent to /dev/null and I am totally clueless.
Later still, my main drive fails.
Now... I just lost all of my work since whenever rsync went south. Not
because I'm an idiot and didn't have a backup strategy, but because my
new Fedora disabled a critical system component (cron's ability to send
mail) that should - that otherwise *would* - have told me there was a
problem within a day or two, long before it compounded into large
amounts of lost data/work.
If we're going to disable important system functionality, it's
*critical* IMO that we beat people over the head letting them know that
we're doing so, so that the people affected don't see functionality
silently removed and only find out about it when it's too late.
I think we've already suggested the best way to do this; make setting up
local mail part of firstboot. Then we simply don't /have/ the problem
that cron has nowhere to deliver notifications.
--
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
--
"You know what Microsoft's problem really is? They've lost the ability
to feel ashamed." -- Pamela Jones (Groklaw)
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