On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 9:51 AM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 9:28 PM, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
Paul Mattal wrote:
We've got several bugs relating to choosing a new default cron daemon, and/or supporting other alternatives.
<snip>
I thought we decided on fcron with the small adjustment/script needed to support /etc/cron.d in the last round of discussion about this. bcron was also popular (+1 from me...) but then we need an anacron replacement too (i.e. fcron).
Aaron has repeatedly called for someone to deal with this and we have had a total of zero volunteers to do so... So if you are going to do this then it would be great. (also have a look at mailman in svn trunk if you have time :P )
Allan is correct here. We looked it over and based on the responses from all devs at the time, decided that fcron is the best in terms of modernizing our cron.
If anyone would like to upgrade our cron to something better, let's go with fcron. Please check the mail archives and bug reports for all the discussion about alternative crons and why fcron was decided. I don't recall all the reasons, but I know they are all there.
Though, I must admit, I did not see this email until after I replied. yacron was not evaluated when we looked into this... On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 6:00 AM, Jim Pryor <lists+arch-general@jimpryor.net> wrote:
Hi, I'm the author/maintainer of yacron. It handles @daily, @weekly, @reboot etc. flags. It also handles more fine-grained instructions, like "try to run once a day, but only between the hours of 2-6 am" (that's not how you word the instruction, but that's what it does).
It handles the /etc/cron.d scripts automatically. The /etc/cron.hourly etc scripts are handled the same way dcron handles them, by having lines like this in the system crontab:
@hourly ID=sys-hourly cd / && /usr/bin/run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
fcron is more powerful but it's also a lot more complex, more complexity than I needed. I forked dcron into yacron because I thought with a little work I could add the extra features I needed but still keep to the tiny codebase. At this point, the upside of yacron is that simplicity (for however much you value it). The downside is---I'll be honest---not many people have been using it. But then I've had no problem reports, the code is really tiny and I tested/scrutinized my changes carefully, and the dcron starting point is quite mature.