Hi I'm the upstream developer of dcron (and an Arch user). As some of you know, I haven't been able to tend to this project much for the past year. Part of the trouble was I was in the middle of a large refactoring project when other responsibilities dragged me away, and I was never able to make enough time to catch up with the bug reports and patches several helpful users sent me. I appreciate all the help you guys sent my way; and I am sorry I wasn't able to push it out more quickly. I've now made some time to catch up with dcron. I've just seen that there's been a recent mailing list thread discussing the long time that dcron has sat with an unfixed scheduling bug, and whether Arch should switch to a different default cron daemon. I wanted to write and push this email out before I read that thread. There are two separate issues here. One issue is that the current developer of dcron (me) has demonstrated he won't always be able to respond to issues promptly. There were some times when development was active, but for the past year an important scheduling bug was left unaddressed. (A scheduling bug in a cron daemon!) Even if that bug will now be fixed, individual users may sensibly prefer to use a program whose development team can commit to being more responsive. Moreover, the Arch distro may itself sensibly prefer to use such as a default. I think those arguments are entirely reasonable; and I don't want to campaign for anyone to stay with dcron if it doesn't suit their needs. However, I still like dcron myself; that's why I took over development of it. And I believe the outstanding issues and most-requested refinements are fixed, or are in the immediate pipeline. So I do want to keep developing it for those who still value its balance of simplicity and features. That raises the second issue: what is the current status of dcron? As I said, my source tree contains a large refactoring push. I have deferred this, and back-ported some important bugfixes, and a few simple features or packaging changes, to a v4.5 release. I'll push this to <http://www.jimpryor.net/linux/dcron.html> shortly; and I hope it can be packaged and pushed to [testing]. I'd welcome any testing and feedback any of you might be able to do. I will push those changes, as well as all the other deferred parts of my source tree, to dcron's git repo at <http://repo.or.cz/w/dcron.git>. And I'll update the dcron-git package on AUR, at <http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=33377>. If any of you were interested and able to test this, I'd very much welcome such feedback too. These will all be pushed in the next couple of hours. Thanks, and I apologize for any inconvenience my inability to keep up with this project has caused anybody. -- Jim Pryor profjimm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
