> Chris made a good point about syntax checking being done at edit
> time. That's reason enough for me to feel the crontabs have to
> be root (or cron-user) owned.

That doesn't necessarily follow.  ISTM that making the crontab
user-owned, in /etc/cron/tabs would be perfectly reasonable, and should
allow the administrator  to address any of the concerns raised here
by normal means rather than extra magic.

Quota: if /etc is not on the same volume as home directories, just establish
a separate but small quota for /etc.  Surely it is better to use an existing
quota mechanism than to invent a new specific one?  (actually the
same argument applies to removing savecore/minfree and replacing it with
a qutoa on a hypothetical ``crash'' user)
If the argument agaist this is that the current quota tools are hard
to use for simple overall tasks like this thaen *that* is the bug :-0)

Protect users from being burnt by editing the crontabs directly: just
make /etc/fron/tabs non-user-searcheable, it's already like this anyhow.
That doesn't stop the file being quota-able, it just makes the
file un-editable/un-cattable, whatever.


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