RPM dependency on cron

[Tomas Mraz]

On Fri, 2009-11-06 at 14:40 +0100, Benny Amorsen wrote: 
> We have a lot of virtualized (OpenVZ) Fedora servers. Until now I have
> avoided running cron inside each server; log rotation is done from the
> host.
> 
> This has worked rather well until lately. Unfortunately rpm has acquired
> a dependency on crontabs, because it adds a file to /etc/cron.daily. In
> turn, crontabs depends on /etc/cron.d, which is provided by cronie.
> cronie explicitly depends on anacron. And thus, anacron and cronie are
> required for all Fedora installations.
> 
> The really nasty thing is that cronie turns itself on when installed! I
> suddenly had an extra logrotate running which rotated logs in a way not
> consistent with our policy.
> 
> I'm not sure where it's easiest to cut this chain. I'd be tempted to
> make crontabs provide /etc/cron.d and make cronie depend on crontabs.
> That way rpm would pull in crontabs but nothing more.

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

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

-- 
Tomas Mraz
No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back.
                                              Turkish proverb