[arch-general] Change Arch's default crond

[Sander Jansen]

On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Thomas S Hatch <thatch45 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Heiko Baums <lists at baums-on-web.de> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>
> Well, seems I am invested... :)
>
> Ok, I think that cronie is worth advanced investigation...
>
> dcron and fcron are not under active development, cronie is
> cronie is small - 0.20MB installed
> cronie is developed by Red Hat - it is not going anywhere and we have
> a guaranteed upgrade path
> As far as I can tell cronie has no deps beyond glibc and pam
> cronie has /etc/cron.d support
> cronie has configurable anacron support via an anacrontab config file
> cronie extends the original vixie cron package so the syntax, core feature
> set, etc are stable
> cronie implements advanced security hooks as well and can integrate with
> SELINUX (I am saving the "include SELINUX support in base for a latter
> date")
>
> At the outset I think that cronie looks to be the most viable option, but
> merits further investigation.

This seems to be a monthly recurring discussion. How about not
providing any default, just put all the different cron(s) in extra?
I think eventually systemd will provide a cron-like service :)

Cheers,

Sander