[arch-general] Myths and reality about cronie

Heiko Baums lists at baums-on-web.de
Fri Apr 22 00:23:58 EDT 2011


Am Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:07:35 -0400
schrieb Kaiting Chen <kaitocracy at gmail.com>:

> First of all the cronie in [community-testing] is compiled with
> --enable-anacron. It installs not only an /etc/crontab but also an
> /etc/anacrontab. Scripts in '/etc/cron.hourly' are run directly by
> `/usr/sbin/crond` while scripts in '/etc/cron.daily',
> '/etc/cron.weekly', and '/etc/cron.monthly' are run by indirectly by
> `/usr/sbin/crond` through `/usr/sbin/anacron`.

And this is one of the main problems with cronie. It needs a separate
/etc/anacrontab for anacron jobs. And this makes it more complicated as
necessary. Fcron only needs one fcrontab for every job. To use the
anacron feature it just needs to be added a "&bootrun" in front of the
line. This way tasks are run as usual cron jobs if the system is up and
as anacron jobs if the system is down. This fits all needs in one, the
needs of 24/7 servers and the needs of desktop systems.

Cronie is nothing else than two different daemons, cron and anacron, put
into one binary but with exactly the same complicated functionality
and configuration.

And the scripts in /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} are run
directly by fcron, too. And by default there is a "&bootrun" in front of
the fcrontab lines which tell fcron when to run those scripts.

Another point: fcron is very well documented while there's no
documentation about cronie, not even a feature list and comparison.

Heiko


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