Comment 23 for bug 27520

On 06/08/2011 12:53 AM, Graeme wrote:
> Nathan: I think that since this bug sat untouched from 2005-2010, you
> can guess that the answer is going to be "No, don't care".

If you look at the changelog for recent versions of cron, you can see
that somebody does care for bug reports.

> I'm just happy if a fix eventually makes into some Ubuntu release at some point
> in the /next/ 5 years.

cron -117 (uploaded to Debian, will be sync'ed to Ubuntu soon) adds a
feature which greatly aids in the recovery of errors which were
previously fatal.

Theoretically, this could easily be extended to #27520 -- just a few
lines of code, actually -- but it's just not that simple, because there
are cases where ORPHAN is completely valid, ie the user really doesn't
exist.

All cron does is call getpwnam(), so it cannot differentiate between the
two cases. Were we to simply re-check the ORPHANS every time, we'd creat
a bug-like situation for that other use case.

Anyway, I'll give -117 some time to settle, and will then revisit this
issue.