On Sun, 7 Nov 2010 22:09:35 +0100, Thorsten Töpper <atsutane@freethoughts.de> 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.
Thorsten
Let's not rush things: * Make sure that dcron is really a dead project and there is no chance for an update. Dropping a core package just because of one bug (which might get fixed) does not sound sane. * The crontab from dcron and fcron are not compatible. So fcron cannot be a simple drop-in repalcement * Some users might prefer dcron; simply replacing it is just not how we roll. People are free to install fcron if they like. -- Pierre Schmitz, https://users.archlinux.de/~pierre