Hi Nicholas, On 01/25/2011 10:12 PM, Nicholas Bamber wrote: > Christian, > I came across this fork today and I was thinking of raising an ITP, > which obviously I don't need to do now. However as I read it you are not > actually thinking of packaging it any time soon, which is a shame. I > cannot see any reason why cronie should not be packaged with suitable > debian/control fields providing two packages replacing cron and anacron > respectively. I would be willing to do it and I would make you and the > other current maintainers of cron uploaders. If it becomes clear at some > point in the future that one is superfluous we would know what to do. I can understand your wish to see this packaged soon, however I'd prefer to follow the original plan for this package, which I didn't outline in the ITP because it didn't seem that relevant to it. "Just" packaging cronie, as-is, is simple. The plan for this package though is to eventually (likely, at least) replace our current cron, since our upstream went dead in 2004 and maintaining our current version is a huge burden. In order to do this is in a manner least disruptive to our users, cronie should be as compatible as possible to the current cron, though -- especially since it's just a fork. Otherwise we risk ending up with yet another cron replacement in the archive with no significant success. The only way to properly integrate all our current features is a clean upgrade process from our 18-year-old vixie-cron-3.1 to ISC-cron-4.1, upon which the cronie fork is based. I'm almost done with that step (I went through every single commit since 1993, and a 4.1 package will be available very soon). Once that is done, I'll begin feeding our bugfix and some of our feature patches to cronie upstream for integration. At the same time, there's a lot of other stuff that needs to be considered, from the anacron situation (IIRC it's just a simple copy of ours, so this should be coordinated with our anacron maintainers and the Fedora guys) to kFreeBSD (cronie makes heavy use of Linux-only features) to many other things. As you can hopefully see now, it's not as trivial as it seems. I hope my reasons for continuing the course are clear now, especially since we have come very close to our goal already. Christian
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