Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Inotify and (f)crontabs

[Ryan Reich]

On 7/8/07, Steve Long <slong@××××××××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > run-crons is a default helper for crons that just works.  if you want to
> > not use it but opt for anacron instead, nothing is stopping you from doing
> > exactly that.
>
> I think Mr Frysinger is grudgingly conceding the point, so can we have some
> stats eg on CPU time saved blah blah blah? But it'd be really sweet if you
> could post em on the forums, as the technical discussion seems over for
> now. (At least to this friendly-coder ;-))
>
> ie: market it to the user base please, not the devs ;)
>
> Please be sure that this works from a clean install and test it on a live
> box as the only system-- for a period of at least a week, as you collect
> sample data. A write up of how to make it work would be ideal for
> Documentation, Tips & Tricks imo.
>
> "2 of 5 - recall to pub" *bzzt*.. click.

Well, as you can tell from the fact that I use fcron, this point is of
academic interest to me.  It's also secondary to my main concern in
this thread, which is getting Gentoo to use incron; right now I'm just
waiting for people to comment on the ebuild I posted yesterday.

In my opinion, this is really an issue for the developers, and indeed
I think Mike Frysinger agrees with that since he views the periodic
scripts (now handled by run-crons) to be something that should "just
work", i.e. be beneath the notice of the user.  Replacing it with an
anacron setup that "just works" should be equivalent from the user's
perspective.

After all, how much of Gentoo is carefully preconfigured to "just
work" out of the box?  Until I installed fcron, the file I saw most
often in /etc was make.conf.  It's one thing to have to configure cron
to do your daily chores; that's necessary, of course, since only you
can know what you want done (but note that Gentoo already includes
daily makewhatis and updatedb jobs, which are the two big ones).  It's
another to have anacron set up just to do the generalized task of
handling this; the user doesn't even need to know it's there.  Just
like they don't know that run-crons is there.

As for CPU savings: are you kidding?  Right now, run-crons is run
every ten minutes, and anacron would be run on boot and every 24 hours
thereafter.  The advantages are clear.  I don't think the users are
invested in the particular implementation at all; since run-crons is,
as Mr. Frysinger wrote in his original response to me, a "Gentooism",
that question is really one for the developers.

To be more pointed about it, it is not even my problem to justify
using anacron, since this is the canonical answer to the question
which Gentoo answers by using a home-grown script "run-crons".
Whoever implemented run-crons should justify reinventing the wheel and
explain how anacron's failings prevent it from working as intended
(and why, at the same time, Gentoo also recommends installing it, or
using fcron).  I'm just here to ask them why.

-- 
Ryan Reich
-- 
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