[arch-general] Change Arch's default crond

[Heiko Baums]

Am Wed, 06 Apr 2011 22:27:27 +0200
schrieb Thomas Bächler <thomas at archlinux.org>:

> That said, fcron lacks /etc/cron.d/ functionality which was the most
> important argument against it. I personally don't need that and I like
> fcron a lot.

Are you sure about that? I mean, I didn't need /etc/cron.d, yet. So I
don't know exactly, but somehow I think it has this functionality. But
don't nail me down on it. I can be totally wrong regarding this. And I
bet I am. ;-)

Nevertheless is this feature really a knockout argument? Is this
feature really necessary? Can't things in /etc/cron.d be transferred
into /etc/cron.{hourly,...} or the usual fcrontab?

Btw., people who really need /etc/cron.d for whatever reason can easily
install a different cron daemon. The question is not to putting fcron
into [core] and removing every other cron from the repos. The question
is which cron shall be the default cron.

> As for your conditions:
> 1) It is very small software, 1.2MB installed, and it has lots of
> features. It is by no means minimal though.
> 2) I commented on that above.
> 3) dcron has @daily, @hourly and so on. In fcron, you can use standard
> crontab entries and add &bootrun to the beginning of the line to
> repeat "missed" cronjobs.

And it runs those missed jobs reliably as soon as it's started at boot
time.

And I would say that this reliability is much more important
than /etc/cron.d.

> I don't know cronie, so maybe you can elaborate more.

As far as I know cronie doesn't have anacron features (&bootrun) like
fcron has.

Heiko