F21 System Wide Change: cron to systemd time units

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 04.03.14 15:54, Miloslav Trmač (mitr at volny.cz) wrote:

> Hello,
> 2014-03-04 15:32 GMT+01:00 Jaroslav Reznik <jreznik at redhat.com>:
> 
> > = Proposed System Wide Change: cron to systemd time units =
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/cron-to-systemd-time-units

It is probably time to port over these jobs now. With systemd 209+ we
should have a somewhat comprehensive solution in systemd now that can do
roughly what cron can do, plus some nice additional features (though
minus a couple of others).

I am looking into adding a couple of more things before the Fedora
release, in order to make this functionality convincing enough that
people can understand why this change is made. For example, I want
support for timer events that can wake up the system, and simple
anacron-like behaviour.

I'd also like to make sure we sell this properly. While I think it
should be a goal to port all cronjobs we *ship* over to this, I want to
make sure that cron is advertised as a good solution for people who just
want to queue a simple cronjob. This is because setting up a timer
service is more complex than setting up a cronjob. A cronjob is a single
line added to "crontab -e" or /etc/crontab. However, a systemd timer
unit will always be two files, and they will have 2+ lines each. While
the systemd way is certainly more uniform with the rest of service
management, it is definitely a bit more work, and I don't want to be in
competition here...

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat