[arch-general] Replace dcron once again?

[Heiko Baums]

Am Sun, 7 Nov 2010 13:57:50 -0500
schrieb Kaiting Chen <kaitocracy at 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