Hi, one of the cron maintainers here, and also the cronie maintainer.
On 07.07.19 17:00, Marc Haber wrote: > On the other hand, there is cronie, which is used in the Red Hat world > for years, is a well-tested code base, maintained upstream (in a rather > slow pace), but only has an eight years old package in experimental on > the Debian side. [...] > Without having a closer look at cronie (it basically works noiselessly > on CentOS systems with me not noticing for months that it's not vixie > cron), my gut feeling says that moving over to systemd timers completly > might not be a good solution, but using cronie in the future might be > helpful. Christian, the cronie maintainer, also being an uploader for > vixie cron, will probably help to make necessary adaptions for a > seamless migration. > > What is the issue that keeps cronie out of unstable? If it just a matter > of personpower, or are there technical reasons? If it's just a matter of > personpower, I'd like to help. It's mainly been personpower; however, that is improving. Any additional help is welcome, of course. cronie was uploaded to experimental ages ago, but it's been rotting there ever since. My goal for it was to patch is so that it is as compatible with our vixie cron (which has quite a few extensions!), to make a transition from cron to cronie as the main cron daemon as painless as possible. This goal was unattainable with the current vixie cron -134, which is still source format 1.0, because it's really hard to carry over features properly from a single huge diff. Over the past couple of years, I've spent a considerable amount of effort in converting the format to source format 3.0 (quilt), but I never quite finished and got distracted with other stuff. Nevertheless, I completed this conversion in February. I'll push it over the next few days (I was just waiting for buster to be released before doing anything drastic). My current plan it to move from vixie cron 3.0pl1-134 directly to a (patched) cronie as soon as possible, so that the default daemon can be switched to cronie in time the next release. I've abandoned the plan of "upgrading" from 3.0pl1-134 to 4.1-1 before switching to cronie (which is based on 4.1): it's just too much work, and I've come to realized that this would just be a waited effort. Regards, Christian
