Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: cron.* and modern cron implementations

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 7:05 PM William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
>
> someone brought this up on the chat channel today, so I'm bringing it
> here to ask for information.
>
> Is there a reason we still use run-parts and the
> /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} structure to run repeating cron jobs?
>
> From what I read in the chat earlier, it sounds like the modern crons
> might be able to handle this without that structure, but I'm not sure.
>

Are you proposing getting rid of run-parts?   Or are you proposing
getting rid of /etc/cron.*?

run-parts is part of debianutils, and ca-certificates apparently uses
it, so trying to purge that might not go far.  I don't think it is
directly in @system so it would go away on its own if it wasn't used.
Some of the cron implementations also use it, and some don't, and each
one can pull it in as needed I suppose.

I don't think you can get rid of the cron.* directories, since that is
the least-common-denominator way for packages to install scripts for
cron to run.  If we wanted to do something else we'd probably need
some kind of eclass that knows how to install a cron script for any of
the various cron implementations out there.  We can't really even just
go to generic cron syntax for some kind of crontab.d handler because I
don't think that is standardized for tasks that are to run if their
scheduled time is missed.

I suspect that maintainers of cron implementations that don't require
run-parts probably already avoid using it.

Maybe you had something specific in mind that I missed?

-- 
Rich