crontab entry environment variables [PSARC/2007/503 FastTrack timeo

[Don Cragun]

>Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:25:58 -0400
>From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld at sun.com>
>
>On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 15:06 -0700, Don Cragun wrote:
>> 	As stated before, other ways of doing this are to have these
>> environment settings affect only the single following crontab entry.  I
>> suggested that long ago, but it was rejected.  
>
>Other implementations of cron/crontab already support a very similar
>syntax extension and it would be confusing to people familiar with the
>other implementations for environment variable settings to only affect a
>single entry.
>
>> Either of these would allow strictly conforming applications to share
>> crontabs with users using the extension without affect the conforming
>> application behavior.  (Again, no knob required.)
>
>The alternate extension you propose strikes me as more awkward to use
>(you have to keep repeating settings); it seems more realistic to simply
>document that if you use the extension, you need to watch out for side
>effects.

I agree.  The alternate extensions were just that: "alternate"s.

All that I said I needed was documentation in two man pages (cron and
crontab) warning users that these features shouldn't be used in shared
crontab files because they may screw up standards conforming
applications when they install crontab entries.  The response to that
request was that users should be able to do whatever they want without
warning (implying that we don't care about conforming applications).  I
don't understand the pushback.

I also requested that the man pages actually document how this feature
works.

 - Don

>
>					- Bill