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

[Joerg Schilling]

"Joshua M. Clulow" <josh at sysmgr.org> wrote:

> > I have headaches with this solution. It is not clean but rather rapes a method
> > that was introduced in order to set up job independent environment variables
> > for the current cron user.
>
> Seriously, it "rapes" cron?  How about "uses somewhat inconsistently"
> or something slightly less emotional.

This is a widely used phrase in Germany to mention that something is abused and 
abusing a method to set up environment variables is what you currently do.


> Also, how would you prefer we specify alternative subject?  I'm open
> to constructive suggestions, but I also don't want to be working on
> this RFE for the rest of my life and I think that this change is
> backwards compatible and useful.  Not all environment variables can
> presently be specified in crontabs anyway -- just HOME, TZ and SHELL.

The standard permits implementations to provide a method to overwrite
HOME, LOGNAME, PATH, and SHELL.

The standard says that the way mail is send is implementation specific method, 
so it would be permitted to implement an enhancement for tayloring the mail 
Subject.

I am not convinced that your method is the right way and I am not convinced 
that a user should be able to hide that the mail was send by cron.

Jörg

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