Improve cron(8)

[Alfred Perlstein]

On 6/23/14, 11:28 AM, Eitan Adler wrote:
> 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.
Agreed, it would be a huge step forward for FreeBSD.