[arch-general] Myths and reality about cronie

[Ionut Biru]

On 04/22/2011 07:23 AM, Heiko Baums wrote:
> 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

what about crons that are added by users? How they will be migrated to 
fcron or cronie?

dcron stores the files in /var/spool/cron
fcron stores them in /var/spool/fcron

Now you see why i do not like a replaces approach?  I do not want to 
mess with crons installed by users and broke them with some hacky 
migration script

-- 
Ionuț