== An Ubuntu astonishment

I just discovered that my Ubuntu test machine (running Dapper, not the
current bleeding edge), installed with a base level of server packages,
does not have cron installed.

It does, of course, have the /etc/cron.(daily weekly) directories, and
cheerfully optimistic packages have populated them with various things
that they no doubt expect to get run every so often in order to keep the
system working smoothly.

(Evidently none of them actively depended on cron, or it would have
been installed. Perhaps this is a bug. Fortunately exim4 did depend on
cron and I actually read the list of packages that were going to be
installed as dependencies, so cron is now explicitly listed as part of
our additional core packages.)

=== Sidebar: a fun Ubuntu dependency chain

As an experiment, I started to install [[eximon4
http://packages.ubuntulinux.org/dapper/mail/eximon4]]
(an X11 based Exim monitoring program). To my surprise,
apt told me that it wanted to install [[dmidecode
http://packages.ubuntulinux.org/dapper/utils/dmidecode]], which struck
me as a rather absurd thing for an X11 program to require.

Except it doesn't, not directly. [[eximon4 ]] requires [[libx11-6
http://packages.ubuntulinux.org/dapper/libs/libx11-6]]
(the main X libraries), which requires [[x11-common
http://packages.ubuntulinux.org/dapper/x11/x11-common]]
(the base X infrastructure), which requires [[laptop-detect
http://packages.ubuntulinux.org/dapper/utils/laptop-detect]] (tries
to detect if you're running on a laptop), which reasonably requires
[[dmidecode]].

(The dodgy hard dependency is [[x11-common]] to [[laptop-detect]];
I would rather not import laptop detection code on servers just so
that I can run X clients. Current Debian packages have moved this
dependency to the X server, which is more rational.)