[arch-general] Change Arch's default crond

[Thomas Bächler]

Am 05.04.2011 09:19, schrieb Thomas S Hatch:
> I can think of three considerations for a cron daemon:
> 1 . Minimal - its a cron daemon, it does not need to be complex
> 2. Active development
> 3. Anacron functionality
> 
> As far as I can see this leaves us with fcron, dcron and cronie. Cronie
> probably has the highest assurance for upstream development because it is
> backed by redhat.
> But I think that having a cron daemon as default that has issues executing
> jobs on time and as they are defined is highly questionable.

Before the current maintainer took over dcron, we had that same
discussion. Aaron even contacted the fcron maintainer (he posted the
reply to arch-general or arch-dev-public, if anyone could find the link
in the archives, please post it). The author responded that he
considered fcron feature-complete, so didn't develop it anymore.
However, he would fix bugs when they are reported, and I think there are
no known bugs right now.

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.

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.

I don't know cronie, so maybe you can elaborate more.

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