I spent way to much time figuring out this simple problem. In Ansible I wanted to have a top-level dict variable in the inventory that could be overridden by a host-level dict.

Example inventory file:

all:
  vars:
    dict1:
      thing1: stuff
      thing2: more stuff
  children:
    some_machines:
      hosts:
        server-a:
        server-b:
          dict1:
            thing1 …

On Debian/Ubuntu sysetems you can set MAILTO in /etc/environment(nor in /etc/default/cron, nor in systemd unit files with DefaultEnvironment) and have it apply to all of your crontabs. MAILTO(among other Cron "environment" variables) must be set within the crontab itself. This dissapoints.

If there is …