On Sunday, 9 June 2013, Christian Kastner <[email protected]> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On 2013-06-07 15:55, Saint Germain wrote: >> On 5 June 2013 23:34, Christian Kastner <[email protected]> wrote: >>> On 2013-06-05 13:12, Saint Germain wrote: >>>>>> Indeed even if cron has nothing to do, a temporary file is >>>>>> always created in /tmp and immediatly deleted. >>> >>> So another workaround for you would be to comment out the hourly >>> stanza from /etc/crontab. >>> >>> Any other solution would be overly complex to implement, I'm >>> afraid. >> >> Ok I haven't carefully read the commit, so I didn't understand why >> this file creation was necessary in the first place (and why other >> distro don't have this behavior). > > To prevent data loss. > > Summarized: one of cron's features is the mailing of output. "Regular" > cron connects to the MTA, runs the job and pipes its output to the > MTA. However, some MTAs time out if they don't receive input within a > certain amount of time, resulting in the output not being sent by > mail, resulting in data loss (see bugs #155109, #443615). > > With the patch, we write to a tmpfile and only connect to the MTA when > the job is finished, thereby preventing this possible data loss. > >> If mounting /tmp on a tmpfs as a workaround is acceptable, >> probably that creating the temporary file directly in RAM would >> also be acceptable ? > > That came to my mind as a possible solution, too. The problem is we > don't know how much RAM we might have available (think embedded > systems), so consuming possibly large amounts of it periodicalyly may > result in Bad Stuff(tm) happening to the system. > > An alternative could be to control this behaviour (pipe to MTA > directly vs pipe to tmpfile) via a command-line flag. >
OK got it ! Thanks for having taken the time to explain. A command-line flag would be ideal, I agree. Best regards,
