how much beer do I need to get this patch applied?

[Jo Rhett]

On Jun 20, 2007, at 10:40 AM, Kurt Buff wrote:

> On 6/20/07, Dan Rue <drue at therub.org> wrote:
>> If it's too broken to complain, then the behavior is the same with or
>> without this patch.
>
> Indeed, which is why this patch might not be such a good idea. In this
> case, absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence, which is
> contrary to the general case.

You appear to be completely confused about what this change does.   
All it does is TO ALLOW (not require) the OP to disable the spurious  
and empty output from successful cron jobs.

If I get a message every day saying "No output", how do I know when a  
failure has occurred?  This patch changes nothing about that  
behavior.  Getting no message is equally useless in the situation  
where no output was generated *AND* the result code is positive.

The more likely is that the OP starts deleting the messages unread  
each day and thus never sees an actual failure report.

> Perhaps the OP needs a better way of dealing with the notifications
> than simply turning them off.

How do you suggest dealing with 1200-1800 messages which simply say  
"no output" each day?  The commands were successful, and the  
processes had no output.

1. In that load level I won't notice one missing, so absence of the e- 
mail is not useful.

2. In that load level I can't possibly read them all.  So actual  
reports of failure will be overlooked.

3. Actual errors *will* be reported, and *will be read* if I don't  
have to delete thousands of non-errors.

-- 
Jo Rhett
senior geek

Silicon Valley Colocation
Support Phone: 408-400-0550