upstart as cron replacement

upstart as cron replacement

Posted Aug 31, 2006 22:48 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111)
In reply to: upstart as cron replacement by smurf
Parent article: What's happening at Ubuntu: from X.org updates to upstart

I don't know if you have looked at the cron code. The thing is ugly, and not just because 19-year-old code shows its age.

Have I looked at the cron code? Heh. Far too long, far too much. I was the Debian cron maintainer for ~10 years (Javier Fernandez-Sanguino took over last year, bless his soul). You don't have to convince me the code is not pretty. However, a package maintainer can only do so much before the codebase is no longer compatible with patches from others.

The twenty #ifdef DEBIANs it has acquired don't exactly help either; the Debian patch, when you run it through wc -l, is larger than the original sources.

Well, I though keeping the Debian specific functionality (as opposed to general fixes) seperated was worth the small amount of visual noise; opinions may vary. If I'd realized how big it was going to grow, maybe I would have chosen differently. Regarding the patch size, you can't compare the linecount to the original - your counting both lines removed and lines added (one each for changed lines), plus all the new stuff in the ./debian directory. And there is *a lot* of functionality in the diff: support for cron.d, some support for DST and clock changes, big security fixes.

Defensiveness aside, I certainly wouldn't argue that you should hack Vixie cron - it needs to be re-written from the ground up, designed around whatever features are desired. I'm just not convinced that combining init, cron/at/etc., and inetd is the correct choice, despite (IMO) superficial simularities. In particular, I think maintaining appropriate security domains may be more complicated than one would like.

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