Re: Please participate in popularity-contest

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Marc Haber <mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de> writes:

> On Mon, 25 Jul 2005 19:50:34 +0200, Goswin von Brederlow
> <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> wrote:
>>Pascal Hakim <pasc@redellipse.net> writes:
>>> The main 'disadvantage' of anacron, is that it's set up by default to
>>> only run /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly}. It won't take care of running
>>> normal cron jobs that would have been scheduled to run otherwise, and
>>> didn't run because the computer wasn't on.
>>
>>Will you report a bug or shall I?
>
> How can anacron decide whether it is ok to run a hourly cron job once
> or n times, or whether a cron job is only meaningful if it is run at
> the right time and does more harm being run at the wrong time than
> being missed altogether?
>
> Greetings
> Marc

A missed cron job should never be run multiple times. If that is realy
needed then the job itself should make sure it is run often enough. I
doubt anything will need that or even get usefull results from running
multiple times. I certainly wouldn't want my mrtg, runs every 5
minutes, to be run 1000 times after boot.

Nothing garanties that cron jobs are run at the right time.  Running
it a bit later (whenever you boot) is just like it being delayed due
to excess load. If there are things that shouldn't be run at the wrong
time we should find them and protect them in the job itself.

I think overall it serves the users more to default to running missed
cronjobs on boot than not. If that causes you problems you can always
purge anarcron or fcron or protect the jobs itself. There might eb
cases where it harms but those should be the minority.

MfG
        Goswin