> The cron daemon is detecting a syntax error, it is reporting it It is not reporting it in sufficient detail. There may be hundreds of lines in a file. If it was just logging a message saying "Some error occurred" (with no indication whatsoever that it is related to cron), would you still consider it acceptable? I hope not, yet you could still argue that "it is reporting the error". The level of detail that one expects from an error report might be somewhat subjective, but I think anybody in their right mind would agree nowadays that file:line_number is a bare minimum.
> IOW, it is functioning as designed. Even if > the design itself is limited. The design is wrong. And by the way I doubt that who designed it put much thought in leaving out the line number, as in "I really thing it's enough to report that there was an error. Who could possibly want to know more?" > Nothing is preventing the administrator from locating that error manually. Yeah right. If it wasn't reporting the error at all, still nothing would prevent the administrator from finding out by himself. > The requested feature would simply make this process somewhat more > convenient. The requested "feature" (at least the line number) would make this process somewhat acceptable. 2016-05-01 22:31 GMT+02:00 Christian Kastner <c...@debian.org>: > On 2016-05-01 22:18, Teo Tei wrote: >> "Cosmetic issue"?? You must be kidding me. > > The cron daemon is detecting a syntax error, it is reporting it, and it > is skipping that crontab -- IOW, it is functioning as designed. Even if > the design itself is limited. > >> Being able to locate a syntax error is vital. > > Nothing is preventing the administrator from locating that error manually. > > The requested feature would simply make this process somewhat more > convenient. >
