[illumos-Developer] webrev: 374 cron should send more useful mail

[Peter Tribble]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 10:15 AM, Joshua M. Clulow <josh at sysmgr.org> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
>  https://illumos.org/issues/374
>  http://cr.illumos.org/view/dwgyf8j8/webrev-374-cron-subject/
>
> Thoughts?

Overall, I like the start of the idea. And the code looks OK.

However, a couple of things occur to me:

1. I know that many of my users have email rules set to match the
existing string in the subject, so this would be seen as an incompatible
change. (Although personally I would rather they fix their cron jobs so
they didn't need to redirect all the output straight into the junk folder.)

2. In a sense, I don't think this change actually goes far enough. It
replaces a fixed string with a variable string. (Which looks really ugly if
your cron job isn't a simple command but a complex shell expression.)
What it doesn't do is what I really would prefer to see, namely a way to
define the subject on a per-cronjob basis. (Currently, I simply wrap all
my cron jobs in a script that emits the mail messages itself rather than
relying on cron to do it, and the primary reason for doing so is to be
able to set the subject to something sensible.)

So, what I would be looking for is a mechanism that allows the admin and/or
the user to specify the subject. That's clearly a rather bigger change than
you've proposed so far, though. (I wonder whether the existing mechanism
to handle HOME/SHELL/TZ could be extended for this case.)

Thanks,

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/