Re: How to package e2scrub

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 02:06:03PM +0200, Lukas Czerner wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> I am about to release 1.45.2 for Fedora rawhide, but I was thinking
> about how to package the e2scrub cron job/systemd service.
> 
> I really do not like the idea of installing cron job and/or the service as
> a part of regular e2fsprogs package. This can potentially really surprise
> people in a bad way.
> 
> Note that I've already heard some complaints from debian users about the
> systemd service being installed on their system after the e2fsprogs
> update.

One of the reasons I deliberately decided to enable it for Debian
Unstable was it was the best way to flush out the bugs.  :-)

Yeah, Debian Unstable users are my guinea pigs. :-)   Doesn't it work
that way with Fedora and RHEL?  :-)

BTW, The complaints were mostly from e2scrub_all not working correctly
if certain packages weren't installed, or if the LVM package was
installed, but there were no LVM volumes present, etc.  The other
complaint I got was when there was no free space for the snapshot.
I'm kind of hopeful that I've gotten them all at this point, but we'll
see....

> What I am going to do is to split the systemd service into a separate
> package and I'd like to come to some agreement about the name of the
> package so that we can have the same name across distributions (at least
> Fedora/Debian/Suse).

Hmm.... what keeping the service as part of the e2fsprogs package, but
then not enabling out of the box.  That is, require that user run:

systemctl enable e2scrub_all.timer

in order to actually get the feature?  (They can also disable it using
"systemctl disable e2scrub_all.timer".)

As far as the cron job is concerned, we could just leave the crontab
entry commented out by default, and require that the user go in and
edit the /etc/cron.d/e2scrub_all file if they want to enable it.  Not
packaging it also seems fine; Debian's support for non-systemd
configurations is at best marginal at this point, and while I'm not a
fan of systemd, I'm also a realist...

What do folks think?

					- Ted