[arch-general] Change Arch's default crond

[Heiko Baums]

Am Wed, 6 Apr 2011 15:30:26 -0600
schrieb Thomas S Hatch <thatch45 at gmail.com>:

> dcron and fcron are not under active development,

fcron is under active development. It's just feature complete and
therefore not developed anymore, but bugs are still fixed if they
occur. So don't mix it up with a "dead" project. I guess dcron most
likely can be assumed to be dead.

> 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

What does that mean? Look at the size and you can see that it can't be
as feature rich as fcron.

> 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

But you need a separate anacrontab. So it's the same as having
installed a cron and a separate anacron. With fcron you just need one
cron daemon which has anacron features integrated. This means you don't
need to have a separate anacrontab. So you don't need to decide if a
task needs to be run by cron or by anacron. You just can add every task
into one single crontab resp. fcrontab and just put &bootrun at the
beginning of the line as Thomas already explained. This means that this
task is run at the desired time if the system is up and the cron is
running, and if not then this task is automagically run as soon as fcron
is started the next time and that very reliably.

So this is much easier and much more flexible than a separate
cron/anacron solution.

That's why fcron is still the best.

And neither /etc/cron.d support nor the fact that cronie is developed by
Redhat is an argument in my opinion.

/etc/cron.d can easily be moved
to /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} or to fcrontab.
So /etc/cron.d is not needed. So this is not an argument in my opinion.
I guess this transition takes about 5 to 10 minutes maximum if at all.

> 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")

Well, is SELinux really a default? Does SELinux run on Arch at all? Is
this really an argument regarding the decision which cron shall be the
default.

As said before, the question is not having removed every other cron
from the repos. The question is about the default cron.

Most people who are regularly discussing this topic here on the mailing
list tend to fcron for a lot of good reasons.

And the few people who really need /etc/cron.d or SELinux support - I'm
not sure if fcron is not able to run with SELinux - can easily install
another cron daemon.

dcron was just kept as the default, because the formerly dead project
was adopted by an Arch user who said, that he wants do keep developing
it and to fixing the bugs. As already said the most important bug wasn't
fixed in a year. And in the meantime it was nothing heard from this
Arch user anymore. So it can be assumed dead in my opinion.

> At the outset I think that cronie looks to be the most viable option,
> but merits further investigation.

I definitely still vote for fcron for reason which have been explained
many times here on the list - not only by me.

Alternatively it can be done as it is already done with the boot
manager in AIF that every cron is listed in the package list so that
the user can decide which one to install or AIF brings a separate
dialog which asks the user which cron daemon to install with a small
or a bit more detailed description of the daemons.

Heiko