On Sat, 10 Apr 1999, Gandhi woulda smacked you wrote:

> I have no intention of moving {,master.}passwd, mk.conf or skeykeys out of
> /etc.  Those strike me as system files rather than user files.

I consider the root crontab, as well as those for system IDs (such
as news and database system owners) to be system files as well. As
I pointed out, a news server melts down and dies if its crontab
doesn't run. Even a default installation with no changes whatsoever
will eventually run into problems without crontabs because /var
will fill when logfile rotations are no longer being done.

> But there are currently no user-edited files in /etc at the moment,
> for what it's worth (note: you seem to consider user-edited to include
> the super-user, while I differentiate between the two).

Normal users can and do change the contents of /etc/passwd and
/etc/skeykeys. I don't understand what the difference is between
this and crontabs. (The only difference I can see is that crontabs
can be much larger, but if you want to change that, it's easy enough
to do something like `echo 1024 >/etc/cron/maxtabsize' to make sure
that no user can increase the space used in /etc/ by more than 1024
bytes.

> ...implied by your tack that we should
> move cron into /etc, crontabs are considered vital configuration
> information...?

Yes. I do consider them vital configuration system, because removing
them changes the future behaviour of the system.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   604 801 5335   De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.
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