Re: PROPOSAL to serialize cron.{daily,weekly,monthly}

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 07-Sep-04, 17:21 (CDT), Carlos Sousa <csousa@tvtel.pt> wrote: 
> The only issue that appears to remain on this topic is, then,
> that in the absence of anacron or other such agents, cron runs
> the .xxxly batches without any concern for possible execution
> overlaps between them (.weekly starting before .daily ends, for
> instance). This could lead to parallell execution of conflicting
> jobs, with unpredictable/wrong/disastrous results.

Such disastrous results that there have been, umm, let's see, exactly 0
bug reports about this in the last eight years.

Look, I'm not denying that such could happen. But it's simply not that
big a deal in real life. Unix is, after all, a multi-processing system.
Even if you serialize the xxxly jobs, other stuff is going on in the
system. If there are jobs/processes that can conflict, then they need to
lock properly in-and-of-themselves, and not rely on other tools to do it
for them.

Steve
-- 
Steve Greenland
    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net