On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 12:09 AM, Paul Mattal <paul@mattal.com> wrote:
Having now learned more about cron and its many flavors than I probably ever wanted to know, I am prepared to suggest a course of action. I've picked up maintenance of dcron from tpowa, and am prepared to move forward. If we can reach agreement, I'll do the work.
I understand there was a previous decision made to move to fcron. However, yacron (a slightly-less-minimal dcron fork) was known and considered at the time, so it makes sense to consider it now.
In the last few days, the yacron author, Jim Pryor, has been blessed by Matt Dillon as the new dcron maintainer, thus unforking:
http://apollo.backplane.com/FreeSrc/ http://www.jimpryor.net/linux/yacron.html
This new yacron/dcron 4.0 option is pretty attractive.
advantages: * simple, small, mature, designed with security in mind * maintained by an Arch user * familiar/standard crontab format * supports anacron-type behaviors * supports /etc/cron.d (more effectively than fcron) * can log to syslog disadvantages: * may not provide all the advanced/anacron-type behavior fcron does * not all of the newly-merged code changes are widely tested
Proposal: We stay with dcron into the 4.0 series, with a longer-than-usual testing window so the transition is smooth, and see if it meets our collective needs. Jim may be willing to add functionality we find lacking.
Please get your votes and comments in by the weekend, if possible. I'd like to move on this next week, if we have agreement.
I think this is a pretty good idea that seems to have solved itself. Props to Jim Pryor for this