[request-tracker-maintainers] Cron jobs

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 09:06:25PM +0200, Niko Tyni wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 01, 2009 at 09:46:11PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> > I've noticed that RT3.8 comes with some suggested cron jobs which are
> > effectively required for some of the functionality within the app to
> > act as expected (emailing digests and dashboards). These cron jobs have
> > not, so far, been shipped with the Debian package.
> > 
> > I'd like to add these, as I think the expectations are that the
> > application should work as designed out of the box, but I'm aware that
> > some people might not want the cron job enabled. For example, I myself
> > won't want them to run during the migration of a database to a new
> > system.
> 
> I assume they are no-ops on an unconfigured system?

I guess they'd have to be made such. As written I expect that they
will fail with an error. I'm not sure that this should be changed; cron
jobs in packages normally do set themselves up to be noisy when 
unconfigured and I think the danger of making them silent is that people
would forget that they should be running and that configuration errors
would be masked.

> > So, does anyone have any opinions on the following possibilities:
> > 
> > 1 add them in a normal config file, and leave for the user to disable
> >   if they want
> > 2 add them in a normal config file, commented out, and let the user
> >   know they need to enable them to get the full functionality
> > 3 generate the cron job file based on the response to a debconf question
> >   about whether they should be enabled (has the advantage that we could
> >   ask about the user to run the cron jobs as - would default to www-data)
> > 4 something else?
> 
> I think it's a bit of borderline case between 1 and 3.
> 
> The debconf thing allows for more flexibility - maybe set the default
> based on whether dbconfig-common is opted in? That way people who don't
> want anything automagical to happen should be content and the rest would
> have a working system out of the box.
> 
> Medium priority for the enabling question and low priority for the cron job
> user would seem appropriate to me.

Given the above about how they behave with unconfigured questions, 3 is
going to be better, and I like your idea about how to tie in the debconf
stuff. I'll try and get this done soon.

Dominic.

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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