[arch-general] Change Arch's default crond

Heiko Baums lists at baums-on-web.de
Thu Apr 7 17:16:46 EDT 2011


Am Thu, 7 Apr 2011 21:53:58 +0200
schrieb Marek Otahal <markotahal at gmail.com>:

> Sorry to sound rude, but Heiko, it's you who is pushing fcron so
> unhealthily heavily. I wouldn't have no opinion on the two crons but
> after reading the discussion I'd stick to cronie. Just my 2c. 

Well, on the one hand yes, on the other hand no.

But let's try to get objective again.

dcron: Known to be buggy.
fcron: Known to work reliably since years, works for 24/7 servers as
well as for home desktop computers, features are known and well
documented on upstream's website.
cronie: Quite new, not known well, if at all, and at least I can't find
neither a feature list nor a documentation on upstream's website.
Doesn't seem to work for home desktop computers, at least not as easy
as fcron (separate crontab and anacrontab), from what I read in this
thread and from the very few descriptions on upstream's website.

A feature comparison between all the cron daemons, at least between
fcron and cronie would be nice.

That are my concerns.

Again, it's just a question about the default cron daemon, not the one
and only in the repos. I wouldn't care, btw., if cronie would go into
the repos, too, even if it has only 3 votes in AUR, yet.

On the other hand this issue could be solved in a different way without
any further discussions. There's a need for installing one cron daemon,
but no need for a default cron daemon. It's pretty the same issue as
with the bootloaders. There's no default bootloader anymore and
currently it doesn't make sense anymore to define one bootloader as the
default, because they all have different features and it depends on the
system configuration which bootloader is the best. In the development
isos AIF asks the user to choose one of currently two bootloaders
(grub and syslinux), more (grub2 and lilo) could or should be added. And
this bootloader is automatically chosen by AIF in the package
selection. The same could be made for the cron daemons. Put every cron
daemon into [core] and let the user choose his preferred cron daemon
during installation.

But if this shouldn't be done, and if there shall be a default cron
daemon it must be a daemon which fulfills every use case and not only
the needs of servers which are running 24/7.

Heiko


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