Anacron/cron suggestion

[Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>]

I made a suggestion about cron and anacron, but it probably got lost
amongst the sendmail thread entitled "Make anacron a base package?" or
whatever -- please change subject lines when the discussion goes way
off subject!

My suggestion was to merge cron and anacron into one package (or
similar), with the default crontab's run-parts commands commented out,
with a comment that they are called by anacron, and with anacrontab's
run-parts commands enabled (perhaps shifted to 20, 30 and 40 minutes
instead of 10, 20 and 30 as at present), again commented as being
called from the crontab daily and executed upon system boot, and that
if these commands are disabled, the corresponding ones in crontab must
be enabled.  In this way, Joe User will have the advantages of anacron
whichever system setup he uses (24/7 or occasional use).  And Harry
Hacker who doesn't like the startup lags can disable the anacron
commands or remove the package.

If cron and anacron are in one package, then I am not concerned about
the /etc/cron.{daily,...} jobs never being run: if anacron is disabled
through its anacrontab, the admin should read the docs and/or comments
and enable the corresponding lines in crontab.

If they are in two separate packages, the default for anacron should
be for anacron to run the daily etc. jobs, and the standard crontab
should be diverted by one with the corresponding jobs disabled.

Thoughts?

   Julian

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  Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
             Debian GNU/Linux Developer.  jdg@debian.org
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