Re: Q: systemd-timer vs cron
On 2022-03-13 11:06, Marc Haber wrote:
> The anti-systemd faction in Debian is cordially invited to step in,
> bring cron and cronie up to shape, before asking the rest of the
> Distribution to stick with essential system software that has been
> unmaintained for years.
I don't think that's a very constructive line of argument. As a former
maintainer, it was evident that user crontabs (crontab -e) are still
very popular, as are some other perhaps niche features, and I've never
had the impression that anti-systemd has anything to do with it.
And in all fairness, I did invest a lot of time maintaining it over the
years before I stepped down recently. I spent hundreds of hours alone on
converting our fork of Vixie cron from source format 1.0 to 3.0 (the
cumulative 1.0 diff spanned more than two decades of changes) so that
our fork can more easily be compared and merged with other cron forks,
such as cronie.
I completed that task a while ago, but then lost all motivation to
continue further. The cron daemons all originate from the early 90s.
systemd timers, being newer, just seem like a much cleaner
implementation, and thus the way forward to me. I could no longer muster
the time or energy to work on something I wasn't happy with, so I
stepped down.
In my opinion, the way forward for cron would be for someone to adopt
cronie, carry over any Debian patches not already included or equivalent
(there aren't too many, last time I checked), and to make cronie the new
default cron daemon.
Best,
Christian
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