[arch-general] Change Arch's default crond

[Yaro Kasear]

On Wednesday, April 06, 2011 15:27:27 Thomas Bächler wrote:
> Am 05.04.2011 09:19, schrieb Thomas S Hatch:
> > I can think of three considerations for a cron daemon:
> > 1 . Minimal - its a cron daemon, it does not need to be complex
> > 2. Active development
> > 3. Anacron functionality
> > 
> > As far as I can see this leaves us with fcron, dcron and cronie. Cronie
> > probably has the highest assurance for upstream development because 
it is
> > backed by redhat.
> > But I think that having a cron daemon as default that has issues
> > executing jobs on time and as they are defined is highly questionable.
> 
> Before the current maintainer took over dcron, we had that same
> discussion. Aaron even contacted the fcron maintainer (he posted the
> reply to arch-general or arch-dev-public, if anyone could find the link
> in the archives, please post it). The author responded that he
> considered fcron feature-complete, so didn't develop it anymore.
> However, he would fix bugs when they are reported, and I think there are
> no known bugs right now.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> I don't know cronie, so maybe you can elaborate more.

Losing /etc/cron.d support is a bit of a dealbreaker for me. I think that's a 
rather huge feature to leave out of a crond.