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

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 10:58 PM, Joerg Schilling
<Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> "Joshua M. Clulow" <josh at sysmgr.org> wrote:
>> 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.

Fair enough -- I would suggest that internationally you could probably
pick a friendlier word.

>> 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.

Well we're already allowing TZ to be over-ridden beyond what's listed
in the standard then.

> 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.

Well, that's what I've done -- implemented an enhancement for
tailoring the mail Subject.

> I am not convinced that your method is the right way

Right, so how would *you* prefer crontab syntax to be extended to
allow the Subject to be customised?  Please provide either a novel new
way to solve this problem or at least provide a detailed and concrete
example where this breaks a bunch of things and isn't worth the
trouble.  I'm open to ideas -- you just haven't presented any, as far
as I can tell.

> I am not convinced that a user should be able to hide that the mail was send by cron.

 [a] The user can already do that by using some non-cron mailer to send mail
 [b] Part of this enhancement adds an "X-Mailer: cron" header that you
can't turn off
 [c] We shouldn't be restricting useful functionality that users actually want

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
UNIX Admin/Developer
http://blog.sysmgr.org