[arch-dev-public] Cron Plan

[Aaron Griffin]

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 12:09 AM, Paul Mattal <paul at mattal.com> wrote:
> Having now learned more about cron and its many flavors than I probably ever
> wanted to know, I am prepared to suggest a course of action. I've picked up
> maintenance of dcron from tpowa, and am prepared to move forward. If we can
> reach agreement, I'll do the work.
>
> I understand there was a previous decision made to move to fcron. However,
> yacron (a slightly-less-minimal dcron fork) was known and considered at the
> time, so it makes sense to consider it now.
>
> In the last few days, the yacron author, Jim Pryor, has been blessed by Matt
> Dillon as the new dcron maintainer, thus unforking:
>
>  http://apollo.backplane.com/FreeSrc/
>  http://www.jimpryor.net/linux/yacron.html
>
> This new yacron/dcron 4.0 option is pretty attractive.
>
> advantages:
>  * simple, small, mature, designed with security in mind
>  * maintained by an Arch user
>  * familiar/standard crontab format
>  * supports anacron-type behaviors
>  * supports /etc/cron.d (more effectively than fcron)
>  * can log to syslog
> disadvantages:
>  * may not provide all the advanced/anacron-type behavior fcron does
>  * not all of the newly-merged code changes are widely tested
>
> Proposal: We stay with dcron into the 4.0 series, with a longer-than-usual
> testing window so the transition is smooth, and see if it meets our
> collective needs. Jim may be willing to add functionality we find lacking.
>
> Please get your votes and comments in by the weekend, if possible. I'd like
> to move on this next week, if we have agreement.

I think this is a pretty good idea that seems to have solved itself.
Props to Jim Pryor for this