Re: Fwd: Re: cron in UTC?
On Wed, 01 Oct 2014, Joel Rees wrote:
> Should I use this as my excuse to actually join the dev team, in spite of
> my misgivings about systemd and the API creep?
Only if you promisse me you are never going to mention systemd again on the
communication threads where fcron work is taking place, except for the bare
minimum actually related to fcron. It will need a service file and an
initscript because it has to be started on boot by both systemd and
sysvinit.
What is a lot more troublesome is that someone in the team will need to test
it SELinux mode. And if Debian ever adds AppArmor, fcron will have to
interface to it as well. cron-like daemons are security-sensitive packages.
> Is your third going to need to run jessie with systemd? How much and what
> kind of hardware/OS resources does he or she need to be able to bring to
> the table?
You will need an unstable chroot, and you must test the packages there, as
that's the maint target for integration. This doesn't mean your main system
must run unstable. IME chroots and VMs are enough to deal with this.
And yes, it has to be tested with systemd and sysvinit, in both cases with
SELinux enabled.
So, it is a reasonable amount of work to do it properly. THIS is why I am
very upfront about the fact that it needs several maintainers with time to
spend on it, and that I won't be able to do much other than coordinate right
now.
We can very reasonably expect the time sink to get a lot better after the
package shapes up, as fcron development is slow (and it looks like it has
picked up some, so it is out of maintenance-only mode!). It is also pretty
clear we have to track upstream development closely, and cherry-pick patches
from the ML.
However, I do recall that maintaining fcron packages was a lot of fun. You
*really* grow as a maintainer when you take care of something like that.
And fcron is a real cool piece of software, although I expect that other
rather nice vixie-cron replacements must have matured in the last 10 years,
so it would also make sense to check the competition first, before spending
a lot of maintainer resources to reintroduce fcron in Debian.
--
"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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