Improve cron(8)

[Eitan Adler]

On 23 June 2014 05:39, Willem Jan Withagen <wjw at digiware.nl> wrote:
> On 2014-06-23 4:08, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>>
>> On 6/22/14 11:54 AM, John D. Hendrickson and Sara Darnell wrote:
>>>
>>> Eitan Adler wrote:
>>>>
>>>> +arch since hackers@ seems to be silent.
>>>>
>>>> On 11 June 2014 23:56, Tomek Wałaszek <tmwalaszek at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>> I saw on the FreeBSD Ideas page topic about cron :).
>>>>> I've started updating the 'original' FreeBSD cron from sources to
>>>>> vixi cron
>>>>> 4.1. I think (well I hope :P) most of the features that were done in
>>>>> FreeBSD cron are now ported into vixi cron 4.1, there are unfortunately
>>>>> some missing features at the moment:
>>>>> - @every_second - this need to be done
>>>>> - -s and -o, in vixi cron 4.1 daylight time switches are enabled by
>>>>> default, at the moment there is no -s and -o options. So you need to
>>>>> remove
>>>>> '-s' from the cron rc script
>>>>>
>>>>> I've also added one feature from OpenBSD, crontab is poking cron using
>>>>> unix-domain socket so we don't need to have suid on crontab.
>>>>>
>>>>> Path is in the attachment. I'm testing it on my FreeBSD box and it
>>>>> looks
>>>>> good but anyway don't try it on production machines :).
>>>>>
>>>>> After the installation we have to do a few things:
>>>>> - Add crontab group
>>>>> - Change group to crontab on /var/cron/tabs
>>>>> - Add sticky bit on /var/cron/tabs
>>>>> - Add group write permissions on /var/cron/tabs
>>>>>
>>>>> This is still work in progress but if someone could have a look on
>>>>> this and
>>>>> give me some feedback it would be great.
>>>>>
>>>>> Regards,
>>>>> Tomasz Walaszek
>
>
>
>>>
>>> you should up the version number or start your own renamed application
>
>
>> Tomek, please don't let messages like this dissuade you from
>> participating.  Please do continue this work, it seems very promising.
>> Thank you!
>>
>> I was myself looking forward to having these additions.  Very cool.
>
>
> Hi Tomek,
>
> One of the things I like in some of the other cron's is the possibility to
> add files to something like: /var/cron.d.
> This as contract to /var/cron/tabs, where files need to <username> and are
> executed under that users privilidges.
>
> Reason that this would be convenient is that tools like puppet don't need to
> start editing files to remove crontab lines. Which IMHO is always more hairy
> then just adding/deleting/updating a file called:
>         /var/cron.d/tool-ABC.cron

This is absolutely useful and has existed in every large scale
envrionment I know of.

-- 
Eitan Adler