updating cron and atrun

[Josh Aas]

I was looking for a way to contribute to FreeBSD and I decided to look
into the cron/atrun project listed on this page:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/IdeasPage#Improve_cron.288.29_and_atrun.288.29

I looked into the current code, commits from the past decade, and the
lineage of other versions of cron to see if there is a reasonable plan
for updating FreeBSD’s cron based on another version. It doesn't seem
like there are any particularly productive new path to take here. ISC
cron is old and unmaintained, and I don’t think NetBSD or OpenBSD cron
is interesting enough to be worth entirely rebasing on. On top of
that, FreeBSD cron seems to have some FreeBSD-specific functionality
that we’d still need to maintain or “upstream” elsewhere.

I’d recommend continuing with the current status quo - keep FreeBSD’s
version of cron and occasionally pull in security/stability patches as
applicable from OpenBSD or NetBSD. The other options are a lot of work
for little (if any) gain. Happy to hear other opinions though.

Integrating atrun into cron might be nice but isn’t very interesting
IMO. Seems very possible that the cost of that churn outweighs the
benefit. I’d love to hear more about why this is a particularly good
idea if people believe it is. Maybe I’m missing something.

If people agree I’d recommend removing the cron and atrun suggestion
on the Ideas Page. Maintaining that page seems like a pain though,
might I recommend keeping track of these ideas as bugzilla bugs,
tagged with something like “ideaslist”? Then you can just link to that
search.

-- 
Josh Aas