Package: cron
Version: 3.0pl1-176
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
* What led up to the situation?
`crontab -l` has started producing garish yellow output that corrupts
the prompt. There is no documentation in the manpage explaining that
colour is produced in some circumstances (just notes in changelog),
and there is no way to force it off except by feeding into a pipe,
which is tedious extra typing, or defining a local alias to do this.
* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
ineffective)?
Ran `crontab -l` on a file containing multiple comments, including
one on the final line of the file.
* What was the outcome of this action?
Garish yellow output. Prompt was corrupted.
* What outcome did you expect instead?
No garish yellow. No prompt corruption.
* suggest fix:
1. document in the manpage that crontab now produces
colour in some circumstances.
2. Fix the patch to reset colour at the end of input.
3. Fix the patch to not change background color of the
first non-comment line after a comment line.
* further enhancements:
4. Provide commandline options and environment variables
to control colour use and configure colour choices
(eg. --color=WHEN / CRONTAB_COLORS - compare:
dpkg (DPKG_COLORS),
grep (--color=WHEN / GREP_COLORS),
less (--use-color / LESS),
ls (--color=WHEN / LS_COLORS),
systemd (SYSTEMD_LOG_COLOR, SYSTEMD_COLORS, etc)
5. Restore the default to be no colour.
6. Liaise with base-file maintainers to enable colour
in /etc/skel/.bashrc for people who wish to use it.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: trixie/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 5.15.0-86-generic (SMP w/1 CPU thread)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE
Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Versions of packages cron depends on:
ii cron-daemon-common 3.0pl1-176
ii init-system-helpers 1.65.2
ii libc6 2.37-12
ii libpam-runtime 1.5.2-7
ii libpam0g 1.5.2-7
ii libselinux1 3.5-1
ii sensible-utils 0.0.20
Versions of packages cron recommends:
ii exim4-daemon-heavy [mail-transport-agent] 4.97~RC2-2
Versions of packages cron suggests:
pn anacron <none>
pn checksecurity <none>
ii logrotate 3.21.0-1
Versions of packages cron is related to:
pn libnss-ldap <none>
pn libnss-ldapd <none>
pn libpam-ldap <none>
pn libpam-mount <none>
pn nis <none>
pn nscd <none>
-- no debconf information
