[arch-general] Replace dcron once again?

[Jim Pryor]

Hi all, I'm the dcron maintainer. I've replied to a few users who emailed me privately, but I wasn't aware of this thread until now.

I agree it's ridiculous to have a cron daemon that can't keep time! I'm
sorry I haven't been able to keep up maintenance properly. I'm a
chronically over-committed university prof who only gets sporadic
windows of time to give to each commitment.

I think I know where the scheduling problems are coming from, and I will
fix them as soon as I can. Part of the reason this hasn't happened
earlier is that I started a large code review early this summer, and was
interrupted by the press of other duties. Not a rewrite, just a thorough
cleanup, but my private git repo is well ahead of the public one. I now
have a queue of fixes and tweaks that users sent me (I think one of them
is even the very scheduling fix that's needed), but the hood is open and
some changes are only half-installed, so I really do need to take a few
days to sort everything out. The problem has been finding the time to do
that amidst all my other responsibilities.

I would certainly understand and could not reasonably object to any
distro's demoting dcron to an unofficial package. But as I said, I I
will fix dcron anyway, I hope within the very near future. I'll announce
here when I believe the git version has the necessary fixes, and if
feedback sounds good, will make a new official release.

Extra hands might not help right at this particular moment, but they
would help the package be more reliably maintained going forward. I'd be
glad to give other interested developers git-push privileges.

-- 
Jim Pryor
profjim at jimpryor.net