Re: migration from cron.daily to systemd timers
Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, Jan 08, 2020 at 10:36:02AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Could you be specific about what you prefer about a cron job over a
>> systemd timer unit? If it's just that you are familiar with cron jobs
>> and not systemd timer units, I'm sympathetic but I don't think that's a
>> very strong argument for the additional complexity you're asking for.
>> Other software in Debian is already using systemd timer units, so
>> you're likely to have to become familiar with them at some point
>> regardless. But if there is some other concrete use case, I'd love to
>> talk about it in specific detail rather than just in generalities.
> As a third party with no particular ax to grind on this, I do wonder
> what the advantage is to adding another mechanism for this particular
> use case, given the need to somehow handle upgrades involving an
> existing (presumably working?) solution.
Timer units allow the administrator to easily enable and disable them
without mucking around with changing configuration files and then dealing
with merging changes to configuration files. (I just had to deal with
this with a spamassassin upgrade as part of upgrading to the latest
stable.) They also handle suspended systems, time changes, and other
related things better than cron jobs (anacron helps with some of that, of
course).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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