[see comments]
[ xxxxx@xxxxx.com 2002-05-19]
A long-term goal is to move dynamically created state files out of /etc;
hopefully we will one day be able to have an option for a read-only root
filesystem-- this is important in environments trying to achieve high
security.
Cron creates a FIFO in /etc/cron.d/FIFO at startup; this of course fails if
the root filesystem is read-only.
While the existence of this FIFO is documented in the cron man page, the FIFO
does not itself represent a programming interface. This should be trivial
to move to something like /var/run/cronfifo. See the suggested fix, which
on my experimental read-only-root system works great.
An additional complication is that our WBEM based cron management
software (part of SMC) knows about the binary protocol which
is talked over the cron FIFO, which is itself a bug: see
6397795 WBEM should not know cron's language of binary moisture vaporators
So the fix here will also have to take that into account.