The day was 07/11/10 23:58 when Heiko Baums had this to say......:
* The crontab from dcron and fcron are not compatible. So fcron cannot
be a simple drop-in repalcement
What are the differences? I didn't need to change anything when I
switched from fcron to the new dcron. If I had to change a bit it was
so easy, that I can't remember anymore. The only thing which has
changed was the command to edit the crontab. It's crontab for dcron and
fcrontab for fcron. But for such changes an announcement can be written
in the News section of the website, in the mailing list and in the
package's post_install(). See the latest xorg upgrade.
And Florian's suggestion was not about removing dcron from the repos,
but only to change the default cron daemon, which is installed without
the user's interaction during installation, from dcron to fcron. So only
new installations would be affected by this change anyway.
* Some users might prefer dcron; simply replacing it is just not how
we roll. People are free to install fcron if they like.
I personally haven't seen big differences between fcron and dcron from
the administrator's point of view.
Heiko
I've just switched to fcron, it's not a straight drop in AFAICT but not
exactly hard.
* crond needs changing to fcron in rc.conf DAEMONS
* You'd need to backup/copy over your crontab from dcron over to
fcron as it
either overwrites the old on or uses one from a different location.
(dcron syntax is working fine in fcron though)
* crontab cmd is a little different (as the install msg tells you)
If (big if i know) the default cron is going to be swapped out, the only
thing i would suggest is warning in advance so people can backup crontab.
+1 from me though for swapping, fcron looks a lot better/more versatile
to me a humble user!
Simon
