Am Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:23:28 -0500 schrieb Paul Mattal <paul@mattal.com>:

Is there also an issue we're trying to solve with anacron? Can't we use bcron (or any other cron for that matter) and still use anacron separately?

I understand that fcron could theoretically do the work of both, but don't see an inherent advantage over two separate tools which might each be better at their own job.

I again answer to arch-general due to write permissions. I vote for fcron because it has dcron and anacron features. Two separate packages is indeed a regression and not really KISS like because anacron can only do anacron and dcron can only do dcron while fcron can do both. And on a desktop system which doesn't run 24/7 you need both features at the same time. On servers which run 24/7 it doesn't harm if the cron daemon has anacron features, too. I'm using fcron since years and it just works. It runs every cronjob as soon as possible. If the system runs then it executes the cronjobs at that time which is configured. If the system is down then fcron will start the cronjobs as soon as possible, as soon as the system is up again. I don't know bcron and yacron but I doubt that they have anacron features. Also fcron supports the directories /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly and /etc/cron.monthly. So it's very easy to configure cronjobs. No cryptical configuration file anymore. Just put a shell script into one of these directories and they will be executed regularly. The old configuration method is still possible. Greetings, Heiko