Idea for a feature

[Matthew Caron]

Hey folks,

I'm just tossing this out for discussion, because I'm not sure it's a
good idea or not. I think that this only affects
upstart-as-cron-replacement.

Here's the scenario/use case:

Matt is a "power user". He has many machines and likes to maintain
various things via cron jobs. The traditional model has cron email the
results to root at host. This doesn't work for Matt, because the host
doesn't have a mailserver. He was using sSMTP for awhile, but now his
ISP has switched to authenticated SMTP and he doesn't want to put
authentication factors in plain text in config files. The irony here is
that all he wants is feedback - not necessarily an email. A log file
would be fine.*

Proposal:
Upstart should have a "result target" configuration option.

If this option is set to "mail" (probably a reasonable default), then it
works as cron does now - it emails the results to the user on who's
behalf the cron job is running.

It this option is set to "syslog", then upstart should log all results
to syslog.

If this option is set to "upstart-log", then upstart should log results
to it's own log file in /var/log (or perhaps some configurable place).

If this option is set to "user-log", then upstart should log results to
the home directory of the user as whom the job is running.

Opinions?

*= I know you can have individual commands log to their own log files,
but it doesn't help when the command does not even appear to be running
and you have no idea why.
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 ~~ Matt Caron ~~