[Bug 606491] Re: start: Job is already running: anacron

[Daniel Richard G.]

Steve,

Anacron sending out a cryptic e-mail due to a hung cron job is a primary
bug in and of itself.  Either don't send out an e-mail at all, or send
an e-mail that doesn't confuse people while leaving them no avenue for
follow-up. You have enough deep knowledge of the system to intuit the
underlying problem from that message. Most users don't---and to put it
bluntly, you're not Ubuntu's target audience.

I agree that the cron job should be fixed so that it doesn't misbehave.
But since that's not going to happen overnight, and hung cron jobs are a
thing, and anacron is part of a default Ubuntu install, and Ubuntu
purports to be user-friendly, we need a fix here as well.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/606491

Title:
  start: Job is already running: anacron

Status in “anacron” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “apt” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: anacron

  Every day cron sends me this email:

    Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2010 07:30:01 +1200
    From: Cron Daemon <root at hostname>
    To: root at hostname
    Subject: Cron <root at hostname> start -q anacron || :

    start: Job is already running: anacron

  I've tried to find out why it was running twice, but I could only find
  one copy of anacron in the cron directories...

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