[arch-dev-public] Arch Linux Status Report, 2009-10-05

[Allan McRae]

Aaron Griffin wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 2:19 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>   
>> Aaron Griffin wrote:
>>     
>>> * Replacing cron with fcron
>>>
>>> This was brought up on the ML a bit ago. It appears that most of us are in
>>> favor
>>> of using fcron to replace our existing dcron. I would like someone to
>>> spearhead
>>> this move. Any volunteers?
>>>
>>>       
>> I'm starting to lean towards vixie-cron as fcron still does not support
>> /etc/cron.d.   Why are we switching otherwise?  Are there other issues with
>> dcron?
>>     
>
> Well, dcron seems to have a handful of minor issues and it's really
> just kind of... blah. Most of the time we try to walk the line between
> "vanilla" and "modern". dcron just feels.... old. And, based on the
> bug reports, it seems most other devs like fcron.
>
> I mailed the fcron maintainer and he DOES still maintain it, but
> considers it feature complete, so does no active development.
>
> Regarding cron.d, it can be emulated with a script that merges cron.d
> files into a system crontab. We could potentially include this in the
> rc.d script.
> http://fcron.free.fr/doc/en/faq.html#AEN2949
>   

That sounds a reasonable solution to the /etc/cron.d issue.

So...   who is tackling this?  There is a fcron package in [community] 
that will serve as a great starting point.

Allan