RPM dependency on cron

[Benny Amorsen]

Tomas Mraz <tmraz at redhat.com> writes:

> Why don't you create a custom package for your site which would
> provide /etc/cron.d but nothing else? 

I guess I will have to do that.

> The dependencies were added because people were reporting bugs that if
> they do not install cronie (+anacron) the jobs are not getting run but
> rpm dependencies do not tell them that cronie is required to run them.

It seems rather surprising that people would miss /var/log/rpmpkgs that
much.

> I mean there is no way everyone can be satisfied with the dependencies
> at least as far as the soft dependencies are not supported.

In this case it seems that just installing cronie by default in anaconda
would suffice.

A similar bug, #474219, was apparently fixed earlier this year, with
Jeremy Katz saying:

"Having crontabs requiring /etc/cron.d means that you can't do a minimal
install without cron, sendmail, etc anymore.

There's nothing about crontabs that requires /etc/cron.d, so requiring
it really is kind of overkill.

Yes, you don't get working cron unless you have a cron daemon installed,
but if I have it chkconfig'd off, they don't run either."


/Benny