Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: cron.* and modern cron implementations

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 3/2/19 7:44 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>
>> Totally. We should replace run-parts with something much simpler and
>> more predictable. Then, if that doesn't work for you, all modern crons
>> can do the things that run-parts tries to do, but better.
>>
> 
> I'm not sure I see the connection here.  All run-parts does is run all
> the scripts in a directory.  That seems pretty simple and
> deterministic.
> 

Oof, yeah, sorry. I thought we were talking about *run-crons* and not
*run-parts*. We should get rid of *run-crons*, which is installed by
cronbase and used by vixie-cron, fcron, bcron, and dcron (according to
grep).

Using run-parts in /etc/crontab also has its problems, but I don't have
a solution handy for that one. Using run-parts runs those daily, weekly,
etc. jobs as root, which may not be what you want if you're operating on
user-controlled data (e.g. bug 662438). The best way to solve this would
be to let packages install their own crontab entries into a directory
like /etc/cron.d, but that location isn't standard.