cron(8) improvement

[Allan Jude]

On 2013-11-05 13:21, Mark Felder wrote:
>
> On Tue, Nov 5, 2013, at 11:37, Nikolai Lifanov wrote:
>> On 11/05/13 12:31, Allan Jude wrote:
>>> This came up in discussion on IRC and I thought I should throw it at the
>>> list so I don't forget.
>>>
>>> A user was asking how to do what linux cron does, where there is a
>>> directory /etc/cron.d/ that packages and add files to to create crontabs.
>>>
>>> Making FreeBSD's cron (Vixie Cron) include /etc/cron.d/ and
>>> /usr/local/etc/cron.d/ in the /etc/crontab format seems like a very
>>> useful feature, especially for pkg(8) as it makes it easy and safe to
>>> programatically add and remove crontabs as part of a package.
>>>
>>>
>> Shouldn't we encourage packages to use periodic(8) when possible?
>>
> Yes but our default periodic configuration in /etc/crontab is only
> configured to be as granular as daily. If this is something that should
> run hourly or at very strange intervals then cron is a better choice.
>
> If the application is installing its own user they could install their
> own crontab file in /var/cron/tabs. I'm certain I've seen a couple ports
> do this.
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I don't have a specific example off the top of my head, but I am sure
there are some daemons that needs to do something at some interval as
root. Personally I am not so sure about having a package create a
crontab automatically. It seems like a POLA violation, but it is also
something that seems to be expected by some modern applications. I
assume it is mostly handled by pkg-message currently, and maybe it is
best to continue that way, but having the additional flexibility may be
very useful.

If for nothing else, it would be a lot prettier than the way I currently
manage crontabs using puppet.

-- 
Allan Jude


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