On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Heiko Baums <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Am Wed, 06 Apr 2011 22:27:27 +0200
> schrieb Thomas Bächler <thomas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> > 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.
>
> Are you sure about that? I mean, I didn't need /etc/cron.d, yet. So I
> don't know exactly, but somehow I think it has this functionality. But
> don't nail me down on it. I can be totally wrong regarding this. And I
> bet I am. ;-)
>
> Nevertheless is this feature really a knockout argument? Is this
> feature really necessary? Can't things in /etc/cron.d be transferred
> into /etc/cron.{hourly,...} or the usual fcrontab?
>
> Btw., people who really need /etc/cron.d for whatever reason can easily
> install a different cron daemon. The question is not to putting fcron
> into [core] and removing every other cron from the repos. The question
> is which cron shall be the default cron.
>
> > 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.
>
> And it runs those missed jobs reliably as soon as it's started at boot
> time.
>
> And I would say that this reliability is much more important
> than /etc/cron.d.
>
> > I don't know cronie, so maybe you can elaborate more.
>
> As far as I know cronie doesn't have anacron features (&bootrun) like
> fcron has.
>
> Heiko
>
Well, seems I am invested... :)
Ok, I think that cronie is worth advanced investigation...
dcron and fcron are not under active development, 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
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
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")
At the outset I think that cronie looks to be the most viable option, but
merits further investigation.
-Thomas S Hatch
-Arch Linux Trusted User
