On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 7:05 PM William Hubbs <[email protected]> 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
