Email notification daemons

[Vincent Ladeuil]

>>>>> "Russel" == Russel Winder <russel.winder at concertant.com> writes:

    Russel> I used to start Bazaar branch email notification
    Russel> daemons using @reboot in crontab entries
    Russel> (cf. lp:bzr-hookless-email).  It seems that Ubuntu --
    Russel> in its infinite wisdom -- has decided to organize
    Russel> things so that @reboot entries in crontab entries now
    Russel> do nothing -- clearly a Karmic thing :-(

I use @reboot too and also experienced... spurious problems. I
haven't diagnosed them precisely for Karmic as they occur in a
context where it's simpler for me to just reboot again.

My understanding so far is that Karmic is now using upstart to
speed up the boot significantly. To do that, the underlying model
has been changed to allow more parallelism (I don't know the
exact details, just that init tasks have dependencies and they
run only when their dependencies are satisfied as opposed to the
previous model where all tasks were serialized). There are
obviously some bugs there and they seem to be fixed as they are
discovered.

To come back to your problem, I suspect that it's not that
'crontab entries now do nothing' but instead 'crontab entries try
to run before their dependencies are satisfied'. That could range
from 'network enabled' to 'volumes mounted' or what not.

I worked around a similar issue on OSX by adding a
'sleep <as-long-as-needed>' before starting my cron job. 

Crude and ugly but effective :)

Hth,

        Vincent