Re: Bug#251980: ITP: hc-cron -- A cron daemon for home computers
On Mon, 31 May 2004, Graham Wilson wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 01:06:48AM +0200, Adam Byrtek wrote:
> > * Package name : hc-cron
> > Version : 0.15
> > Upstream Author : Felix Braun <fbraun@atdot.org>
> > * URL : http://freshmeat.net/projects/hc-cron/
> > * License : GPL
> > Description : A cron daemon for home computers
> >
> > It runs specified jobs at periodic intervals and will remember the
> > time when it was shut down and catch up jobs that have occurred
> > during down time when it is started again. Hc-cron is based on the
> > widely used vixie-cron and uses the same crontab format so that it
> > can be used as a drop-in replacement for that program.
fcron can do all of this, it is stable, it has been in Debian for some time
now, and it has SE Linux support and a friendly upstream which likes Debian.
Why do we need hc-cron? What sets it appart from fcron? Fcron uses its own
binary format for the compiled crontabs, but the format for "fcrontabs" that
is visible to the user is very much the same as vixie cron's with a few
extensions. It lets any user have fcrontabs, much the way cron does. It
has frequency-based, boot-or-at-a-certain time scheduling (and many other
scheduling modes and capabilities), it can do load monitoring to start jobs
in low-system-load slots, it has nice() support... and the list goes on and on.
In fact, I bet fcron upstream would, should someone do most of the grunt
work, be amicable to making sure fcron could work as a drop-in replacement
for Debian cron (i.e. with all the Debian quirks). I didn't have the time
when I was maintaining it, and I don't think Russell Corker does either...
but who knows :)
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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