[arch-general] Replace dcron once again?

[Pierre Schmitz]

On Sun, 7 Nov 2010 22:09:35 +0100, Thorsten Töpper
<atsutane at freethoughts.de> 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.
> 
> Thorsten

Let's not rush things:

* Make sure that dcron is really a dead project and there is no chance
for an update. Dropping a core package just because of one bug (which
might get fixed) does not sound sane.
* The crontab from dcron and fcron are not compatible. So fcron cannot
be a simple drop-in repalcement
* Some users might prefer dcron; simply replacing it is just not how we
roll. People are free to install fcron if they like.

-- 
Pierre Schmitz, https://users.archlinux.de/~pierre