[arch-general] Replace dcron once again?

Alex Matviychuk alexmat at gmail.com
Fri Nov 12 02:26:05 CET 2010


Thanks to this thread I decided to look at both dcron and fcron. First
google result for dcron led me to this:

1 Why use dcron when there's fcron?
-----------------------------------
- dcron is SIMPLE:
	dcron just gives you two binaries, crond and crontab, and consists
	only of a few source files.
- dcron is SMALL:
	binaries (i386-elf) are only about 25k
- dcron is MATURE:
	it is many distributions' default cron and in use since ~1994.
- dcron is SECURE:
	that's the consequence of being simple and mature.
- dcron WORKS:
	fcron only worked for root on my box, no matter how hard I tried.

This is from a Linux From Scratch readme here:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/dcron.txt

>From my naive point of view, it seems like dcron is more in line with
the Arch Way.

In response to the initial concern about a bug in dcron, don't we have
anyone in our userbase that could take a look at the dcron code? As
far as updates, I wouldn't expect a basic mature package to be updated
more than once or twice a year. Update frequency alone says nothing
about the quality of the code.

My vote would be to focus efforts on fixing the bug and to keep Arch
as small and lightweight as possible at its base. One of the best
parts of Arch for me is that it starts out minimalistic and you can
extend it to make it fit your needs. Trying to make our favorite
packages defaults instead of minimal, stable, small packages, is a
mistake imho.

Cheers,
Alex


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