[arch-general] Replace dcron once again?

[Markus Trippelsdorf]

Thorsten Töpper wrote:

> On Sun, 7 Nov 2010 21:09:12 +0100
> Heiko Baums <lists at baums-on-web.de> wrote:
>> 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
> 
> 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.

+1
and don't forget that you can see what job will run when:
 
# fcrondyn -x ls
password for root :
ID    USER   SCHEDULE         CMD
14    markus 11/07/2010 22:20 /usr/bin/getmail -q
0     systab 11/07/2010 23:01 /usr/sbin/run-cron /etc/cron.hourly
12    root   11/07/2010 23:50 /usr/bin/rsnapshot daily
13    root   11/08/2010 00:00 /usr/bin/rsnapshot hourly
1     systab 11/08/2010 00:02 /usr/sbin/run-cron /etc/cron.daily
10    root   11/08/2010 02:15 /usr/sbin/trim /
11    root   11/13/2010 23:40 /usr/bin/rsnapshot weekly
2     systab 11/14/2010 00:22 /usr/sbin/run-cron /etc/cron.weekly
3     systab 12/01/2010 00:42 /usr/sbin/run-cron /etc/cron.monthly

This is very useful for consistency checking.