Thorsten Töpper wrote:
On Sun, 7 Nov 2010 21:09:12 +0100 Heiko Baums <lists@baums-on-web.de> wrote:
Am Sun, 7 Nov 2010 13:57:50 -0500 schrieb Kaiting Chen <kaitocracy@gmail.com>:
I think fcron is kind of heavy for most users. I'd rather we switch to cronie, which is the descendent of vixie-cron. It's developed by RedHat, well maintained, supports PAM and SELinux and can be built with anacron features.
I disagree with Kaiting, because cronie doesn't have anacron features.
If it's compiled with --enable-anacron there is no anacron feature compiled into cronie. Instead there is a separate anacron daemon compiled and that makes it unnecessarily complicated in using and configuring it. And people who need anacron features have to run two daemons and configure two daemons.
With fcron you have all in one and need to run and configure only one daemon. And fcron is by far not bloated and complicated to configure. Instead there are several ways to configure fcron like crontab, scripts in /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly} and in /etc/cron.d. And to use anacron features you only need to prefix a crontab entry with an @.
So I think fcron is much more flexible, much easier to configure and to use than cronie, and has features for rather every use case.
And, please, don't make such a regression again.
Btw., cronie is in AUR since May and still has only 1 vote while fcron is proven to run very well since years.
Heiko
I agree with Heiko and Florian, I myself am using fcron since spring and moved at my machines(including VMs that run more often) one after another to fcron and I'm happy with it. It's easy to configure, comes with the default jobs (=runs /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly}/*) and thus if for a user who doesn't do much with cron nothing to worry about, everyone else gets next to the default possibilities several features that are really helpful. Furthermore it is well documented, so even people who begin to play with cronjobs have a spot where they can look for information and get an answer almost for sure.
+1 and don't forget that you can see what job will run when: # fcrondyn -x ls password for root : ID USER SCHEDULE CMD 14 markus 11/07/2010 22:20 /usr/bin/getmail -q 0 systab 11/07/2010 23:01 /usr/sbin/run-cron /etc/cron.hourly 12 root 11/07/2010 23:50 /usr/bin/rsnapshot daily 13 root 11/08/2010 00:00 /usr/bin/rsnapshot hourly 1 systab 11/08/2010 00:02 /usr/sbin/run-cron /etc/cron.daily 10 root 11/08/2010 02:15 /usr/sbin/trim / 11 root 11/13/2010 23:40 /usr/bin/rsnapshot weekly 2 systab 11/14/2010 00:22 /usr/sbin/run-cron /etc/cron.weekly 3 systab 12/01/2010 00:42 /usr/sbin/run-cron /etc/cron.monthly This is very useful for consistency checking.