Michael Orlitzky wrote on 2017-10-29 14:16:
> And then the real issue: no one knows what our cronbase is doing, and it
> does whatever it does all wrong -- but some people are probably relying
> on it. My proposal was to make cronbase stupider, with something like
>
> 9 5 * * * root find /etc/cron.daily -execdir '{}' \;
>
> That says: run everthing in cron.daily[0], every day, at 05:09. It does
> exactly that: it has DST issues, if your machine is off the jobs won't
> run, etc. But it's predictably stupid and works as advertised, unlike
> the run-crons shell script we have now.
This may solve my problem, but it also changes other behavior that
people rely on, as you note, so I understand that there is some
resistance to change. My patch only solves the precise issue of
double-running jobs on DST to non-DST transition, without changing
behavior that people rely on (unless they do rely on the double-running,
of course <https://xkcd.com/1172/>).
> Do you need something smarter? Install anacron, fcron, cronie, or
> whatever. But the worst thing we can do is try to mimic those
> intelligent crons and have it fail to do so randomly. That's still your
> best option, by the way: rewrite your crontab to avoid run-crons, and
> install a smart cron implementation that does what you want.
No, my best option is to apply my patch locally and run with that, which
is what I've done, but it's always nice to reduce the number of patches
to keep track of. My own cron jobs are configured in /etc/cron.d anyway,
so they aren't affected. But at least I won't get the email from
logwatch twice anymore.
-- Remy
