On 04/05/18 09:10 AM, Alex Beamish via talk wrote:
On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 8:11 AM, Jamon Camisso via talk
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 2018-05-03 10:44 AM, Alex Beamish via talk wrote:
> I'm developing scripts that get run by crontab, so I'm in there
making
> updates fairly regularly. I would love to be able to document
the changes,
> so I'm wondering if there a usual and customary technique to version
> crontabs?
I've used RCS for lots of ad-hoc systems file tracking, and at least
once replaced crontab with a script that added a check-in after calling
the real crontab -e. It could easily do a git commit && git push instead.
--dave
What are you changing in crontabs so much that you need versioning?
I'm developing EDI scripts, and as development progresses, some of the
older scripts are being replaced by newer scripts. On occasion, there
are times when I need to disable a crontab job while I solve an issue.
Having version control would be a great back-stop, and would also be
useful from a historical point of view. (Why did I disable that job
last Thursday? Where did the such and such script go?)
Shouldn't all the logic be in your scripts? Maybe I'm missing
something,
but it seems like needless complication to me.
What to do and how to do it is in the scripts. How often to do it is
in the crontab.
> Ideally there would be some sort of hook around 'crontab -e',
but failing
> that, I'd have the output of 'crontab -l' (run regularly by
cron?) go to a
> versioned file. Plan B sounds a bit hokey to me.
If you do need to version things, you can just chuck a git repo under
/var/spool/cron/crontabs and ignore any files there you don't want
tracked.
Under my system, that directory is owned by root, and I prefer not to
version anything as root; the code I'm developing is application code,
not system code.
The solution I'm leaning towards is to have a shell script for
updating the crontab that would do something like
1. pushd $local_crontab_directory
2. crontab -e
3. crontab -l >crontab.$username
4. git diff crontab.$username
If there were changes revealed by the 'git diff', and if I felt they
were significant, I could do a git commit, followed by a popd.
Thanks for your questions -- they helped me clarify my understanding
of the problem and a possible solution.
--
Alex Beamish
Software Developer / https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alex-beamish-5111ba3
Speaker Wrangler, Toronto Perlmongers / http://to.pm.org/
Baritone, Board Member, Toronto Northern Lights, 2013 Champions /
www.northernlightschorus.com <http://www.northernlightschorus.com>
Certified Contest Administrator, Barbershop Harmony Society /
www.barbershop.org <http://www.barbershop.org>
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