Re: git maintenance broken on FreeBSD

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Aug 13, 2022, 17:35 UTC
Message-ID: <Yvfg7WwL8oCdxqzQ@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqsfm08382.fsf@gitster.g>

On 2022-08-13 at 17:26:05, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> Does FreeBSD offer choices of cron implementations other than Vixie,
> just like some Linux distributions?  If somebody on a non-FreeBSD
> platform happens to choose to use Vixie, then they would presumably
> have the same problem, so a compile-time switch, whose default is
> hardcoded based on the target platform, would not work very well.
> The default will be wrong for some users, and users can later choose
> to switch between different cron implementations.

I'm using Debian unstable, and I'm using Vixie cron. I believe that's the default implementation. However, I could also well use cronie, since that's available in Debian as well. So, yeah, I think this is a thing to consider.

Show 6 quoted lines

> Configuration knob can be used as a workaround, but in this case, I
> am not sure if it is worth doing.  What's the downside of securely
> opening a temporary file and write whatever we are currently piping
> to a spawned "crontab" command and then giving the path to that
> temporary file to the "crontab" command?  Wouldn't that give us the
> maximal portability without that much code, no?

I think we should try to provide an option which works across at least the versions on a particular OS. The temporary file seems like a nice, portable option, so I think we should just do that unless there's some practical objection.

If Derrick doesn't get to it this next week, I can send a patch.

-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA