Improve cron(8)

[Tomek Wałaszek]

2014-06-23 21:48 GMT+02:00 Konstantin Belousov <kostikbel at gmail.com>:

> On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 09:33:38PM +0200, Tomek Wa??aszek wrote:
> > 2014-06-23 18:53 GMT+02:00 Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org>:
> >
> > > On 23 June 2014 06:26, Tomek Wa??aszek <tmwalaszek at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hello,
> > > > I got your point.
> > > > From the technical perspective it should be quite easy to implement
> this
> > > > feature, but I'm not sure whether this will get positive feedback. I
> > > > remeber that there was a discussion on the OpenBSD mailing lists
> (there
> > > was
> > > > even a patch for this) but they don't like the idea :) maybe FreeBSD
> > > > project will like it, I don't know.
> > > >
> > > > At the moment I want to update FreeBSD cron to ISC cron (with all the
> > > > features that FreeBSD has at the moment and ISC does not have) and
> > > > integrate atrun into cron like it was done in OpenBSD cron. After
> that
> > > (or
> > > > faster who knows :)) maybe we should have a discussion about this
> idea.
> > >
> > > Sweet!
> > >
> > > Well, hm. How should we do it? Can we run both cron's in the same
> > > source tree and just pick which to build/install? They're both
> > > different crons, right? Or is there a common ancestor that makes the
> > > diff not so terrible?
> > >
> > >
> > > -a
> > >
> >
> > Hi,
> > I don't quite follow you, who said that there will be cron's? There will
> be
> > one cron, from the functional perspective it will work just like it is
> > working now. The main differences will be that for example crontab will
> not
> > have suid, atrun will be integrated and it will for example has the
> ability
> > to run jobs from files in /var/cron.d but this will be not mandatory
> > feature to use, /etc/crontab will stay.
>
> Could you, please, explain the methodology you use to ensure that
> all local FreeBSD modifications to out version of the Vixie' cron
> are carried forward together with the update ?
>
> We do not used the vendor imports/contrib workflow for the cron,
> so FreeBSD-specific modifications are just sit there.  The history
> on head/usr.sbin/cron  is huge, there is a lot of private changes
> for the old codebase.
>

Hi,
Yes, sure.
The methodology is simple, if we can call this methodology. I download the
new ISC CRON 4.1 and I'm going through the commit logs from usr.sbin/cron
and adding the changes that were done in FreeBSD to ISC CRON 4.1. I don't
know whether this is the best approach but I don't know any better at the
moment. And this is still work in progress, not all of the changes are
there.
At first I was thinking of leaving ISC CRON 4.1 alone and only take care of
the parts that were done in OpenBSD like atrun integration and poking cron
via unix-domain socket. But on the FreeBSD ideas page there is written that
the cron implementation is outdated and should be update to ISC cron. So I
started doing it.

-- 
Best regards,
Tomasz Wałaszek