Question about ports adding cronjobs

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 01:02:34AM +0200, Pietro Cerutti wrote:
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> David Hawthorne wrote:
> | I have a piece of software I've been working on that gathers stats about
> | the local host and shoves them into rrd files, with an accompanying web
> | front-end page that generates pretty graphs from the RRDs on demand.  I
> | have a package done up for it, and I'd like to add it to the ports tree
> | eventually, but I'm stuck on how to get it to automagically add the
> | cronjob to have the stats gathering script run every five minutes, and I
> | don't know of any ports that add cronjobs off the top of my head to go
> | look at.
> |
> | Is there an approved standard for doing this?  It doesn't have to be as
> | root, either, it can run under a different user.  Any advice on how to
> | get the port to add the user (and remove it properly when the port is
> | deinstalled) properly and securely would be appreciated as well.
>
> The only port which comes to my mind which goes near to what you want to
> achieve is sysutils/bsdstats, which installs a script in periodic/monthly.
> If running daily is enough you may want to look at that.
>
> Another option would be to create a support script/daemon and place it
> in rc.d. The script/daemon would then sit idle and wake up once every
> <your preferred time here> and gather your statistics.
>
> Third option: instruct the user (via a message at post-install stage) on
> how to setup the cron job.

Or a fourth option: do what mail/postfix does, and prompt you
interactively during the install phase whether or not you want <thing>
done to your system.  In the case of mail/postfix, it prompts you to
permit modification of /etc/mail/mailer.conf.

Automatic modification of cronjobs, system files, etc. == generally
shunned.  I don't mind if the port asks me for permission to do such,
but I do mind if it blindly starts modifying things on my system without
my approval.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |