Considering POLA I believe it would be better as an opt-in kind of thing rather than opt-out. If people need it they can enable it. In general opt-out changes should be avoided. Just flipping this around is likely to cause many many unexpected issues for people who are not paying close attention.
On Wed, Nov 4, 2026 at 5:14 PM Poul-Henning Kamp <[email protected]> wrote: > It seems that we have solid consensus for jittering by default, with > option to disable. > > I had not spotted the -j/-J options to cron before I raised the > issue, but given those, I dont see neither an need for code changes > nor bike-sheds about their syntax. > > It is of course mathematically ideal to jitter [0…59[ seconds. > > But that would lead to some anomalies which I would rather avoid, > for instance a "every minute" job being called twice within a few > seconds. > > In power grids the relevant regulation time constants are typically > below 10 and almost always less than 15 seconds. > > So on balance, I propose we change the cron default arguments to include > > -j 20 -J 20 > > That way there will be at least 40 seconds between "once per minute jobs". > > -- > Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 > [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 > FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe > Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. > >
