Re: crontab -r is way to powerful of a command to not have a confirm message

[Bob Proulx]

Stephane Chazelas wrote:
> address@hidden:
> > crontab -r is way to powerful of a command to not have a confirm message, 
> > 
> > particularly because the "r" key is right next to the "e" key, and
> > people crontab -e all day.

It used to be that a best practice for user crontab files was to
maintain a copy of the crontab in the user's home directory.  Edit
that file and then load that file when making changes.

  $EDITOR ~/lib/crontab
  crontab ~/lib/crontab

Because the file is continuously existing in the home directory it
will get backed up with the normal backup.  Otherwise crontabs are one
of the often forgotten items since it is stored elsewhere.

And by doing things this way there is no need for either -e or -r.

> > How can I contribute to the gnu crontab project?
> 
> There are several cron/crontab implementations, none of which
> maintained by the GNU project AFAIK. See
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron#Modern_versions

Correct.  Most software distributions use a patched version of Vixie
Cron.  There hasn't been a new release in many years.  Therefore
downstream distributions are maintaining changes as a long set of
patches to the base code.  There isn't an official GNU version.
Trisquel and gNuSense will be doing the same thing as other distros
and will be maintaining patches on top of the last old release.  Any
changes would have to go into the downstream patches that area
distribution specific.

HOWEVER!  Changing long standing behavior is almost always a bad
thing.  When something has been working in a certain way for decades
then changing it never has a good result.  'crontab -r' has removed
the crontab for *a very long time*.  Changing something like that now
after all of these years is not a good idea.

> If on a Debian GNU system or derivative, you can check which
> implementation your contrab comes from with:
> ...
> In my case, it's the one from the Internet Software Consortium.

Good information.  It would be super awesome if the ISC were to make
an updated release that incorporated the common set of patches that
has been maintained by the distros.  I am not expecting that to happen
any time soon however.  Which is a shame for a standard tool that
exists on every system.

Bob