F15 Feature - convert as many service init files as possible to the native SystemD services

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 25.11.10 08:39, Tomas Mraz (tmraz at redhat.com) wrote:

> > That's the point of the .path unit. i.e. you can list dirs to watch. If
> > a user then drop a file into one of those dirs cron gets automatically
> > started.
> > 
> > Basically, in your .path unit you'd write something like this:
> > 
> > [Path]
> > PathExists=/etc/crontab
> > DirectoryNotEmpty=/etc/cron.d
> > DirectoryNotEmpty=/var/spool/cron
> > 
> > And the moment where /etc/crontab starts to exist, or somebody drops a
> > file into /etc/cron.d or /var/spool/cron crond would be automatically
> > started.
> 
> But what is the point of this? The /etc/crontab always exists and there
> always are some files in /etc/cron.d.

The only contents of /etc/crontab and /etc/cron.d is the lines to handle
/etc/cron.daily and friends. As mentioned we can easily run those as
normal timer-triggerd units inside of systemd itself (and get all the
features it offers you for free, nice introspection, logging, IO/CPU
scheduling hooks, yadda yadda). So, if you remove that /etc/crontab is
empty and hence could be removed. And /etc/cron.d is empty too. And
there you go, we can support cron jobs just fine, but won't even start
it on most machines, but the user won't se the difference in the
behaviour.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.