[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#484014: Bug#484014: This is a local policy decision

[Russ Allbery]

Micah Anderson <micah at riseup.net> writes:

> After taking an informal poll on #debian-devel the answer seems to be
> that this is a policy decision, but its normal to assume that packages
> should only ever use /etc/cron.{d,daily,hourly,monthly,weekly} and that
> users/admins should not use these and instead prefer user crontabs. The
> reason would be that packages might clobber files you install in these
> directories.

I'm not sure the chances are any higher than that two packages will
conflict on the same cron.d file, and you can deal with it the same way.
But more fundamentally, if you want to use /etc/cron.*, there's no reason
to use the Puppet cron type at all.  Just use a simple file type and
install the fragment of your choice.  That's what makes /etc/cron.* so
nice -- there's no need to support multiple processes changing the same
file or all the complexity that Puppet's cron type abstracts.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>