On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Xavier wrote:

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 8:46 PM, Aaron Griffin wrote:

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We've had a few bugs regarding the issue of our crappy default cron.

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16085

On a related note: dcron does not support /etc/cron.d/ and it irritates me to no end. fcron can do this, correct? If not, we should remove the cron.d dir from the package

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From 16085 : Of course fcron has the same "problem" of not handling /etc/cron*, but this can usually be worked around by a simple script which runs/imports/etc. the relevant files.

But fcron is french, so it MUST be good. ahahah Go go french cron !

Oui oui! C'est chouette!

Aaron Griffin schrieb:

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Another suggestion was vixie-cron - personally I have been using fcron on LFS since 2001 or 2002 and later on Arch, and have been happy with it all those 8 or 9 years. Whatever we do by default, I will keep on using fcron.

It sounds like you're a little hesitant about this. What are our options here? fcron, bcron, vixie-cron?

I wasn't planning on sounding hesitant. I only know fcron and never used vixie or bcron. fcron is very small, fcrontabs are compatible with traditional crontabs, but have an optional extended syntax that supports many advanced features. Did I mention that it is still pretty small? The only thing that one might worry about is that people might say fcron is "unmaintained" - but then I haven't seen a single bug or missing feature in the current release, so maybe this apparent lack of maintenance is a result from a lack of need for maintenance.

Thomas Bächler a écrit :

Aaron Griffin schrieb:

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Another suggestion was vixie-cron - personally I have been using fcron on LFS since 2001 or 2002 and later on Arch, and have been happy with it all those 8 or 9 years. Whatever we do by default, I will keep on using fcron.

It sounds like you're a little hesitant about this. What are our options here? fcron, bcron, vixie-cron?

I wasn't planning on sounding hesitant. I only know fcron and never used vixie or bcron. fcron is very small, fcrontabs are compatible with traditional crontabs, but have an optional extended syntax that supports many advanced features. Did I mention that it is still pretty small?

The only thing that one might worry about is that people might say fcron is "unmaintained" - but then I haven't seen a single bug or missing feature in the current release, so maybe this apparent lack of maintenance is a result from a lack of need for maintenance.

I agree. "Maintained" does not necessarily mean "there are new releases every X months". Strictly speaking it rather means that if a bug or security issue is reported to the developers, they will fix it. There is occasionally software that really is bugfree and does not require change to the code :) Examples do not abound, for sure.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:04 AM, Allan McRae wrote:

Thomas Bächler wrote:

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Aaron Griffin schrieb:

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Another suggestion was vixie-cron - personally I have been using fcron on LFS since 2001 or 2002 and later on Arch, and have been happy with it all those 8 or 9 years. Whatever we do by default, I will keep on using fcron.

It sounds like you're a little hesitant about this. What are our options here? fcron, bcron, vixie-cron?

I wasn't planning on sounding hesitant. I only know fcron and never used vixie or bcron. fcron is very small, fcrontabs are compatible with traditional crontabs, but have an optional extended syntax that supports many advanced features. Did I mention that it is still pretty small?

The only thing that one might worry about is that people might say fcron is "unmaintained" - but then I haven't seen a single bug or missing feature in the current release, so maybe this apparent lack of maintenance is a result from a lack of need for maintenance.

All cron's seem to have no releases in recent years...  so I doubt that can be used to choose.   So features seem the way to go.  For those that want a fairly good guide to the different crons, check out http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/cron-guide.xml#doc_chap2

I remember fcron from my LFS days, so I am happy using it.   when a decision is not obvious, select from nostalgia. :P

Allan

I have no objections in replacing dcron by another alternative. fcron seems to be the popular choice so far. Another advantage for fcron is that it would also replace my anacron package in community.