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

["Artur R. Czechowski" <arturcz@hell.pl>]

On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 01:33:55AM +0300, Abdullah Ramazanoglu wrote:
> Well, there was a really inconvenient behavior, bordering a bug, with
> using anacron for cron.xxxly : It was breaking the timing sync of
> cron.weekly to week-ends and cron.monthly to start of months.
Right. It is critical to you to run cron.weekly on Sunday and cron.monthly
at 1st day of month?
I can imagine a situation when it is important, but it is rather rare case.
It requires that unix box is under heavy load 24h during working days and
lower load during Sat/Sun. In any other case I see no reasons to run
weekly/monthy jobs on Sunday/at 1st.

Well, if it is your case it really requires a special configuration. But for
most people default settings in Debian should work.

> So, I would like to improve on my original proposition, and I now propose
> that anacron should only be used as a fallback mechanism, and cron.xxxly
> should be given under cron's sole control, and a means (other than
> anacron) should be employed to serialize cron.xxxly jobs.
I would like to propose another solution. Let's left jobs' definition
as they are, giving to administrator an option to choose (anacron or
crontab). Let crontab do nothing about serialisation. Instead run-parts
could respect additional, optional parameter: --lock <lockname>.
Some run-parts calls could use the same <lockname> - in this case only one
run-parts could run. Another one could proceed only after the running one
finishes.

Cheers
	Artur
-- 
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