GNU Mcron 1.1 Released As Their Replacement to Vixie Cron

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNU Mcron 1.1 Released As Their Replacement to Vixie Cron

The GNU Project has released an updated version of their alternative to Vixie Cron from handling cron jobs. Today's Mcron 1.1 release is the first update to the project in several years...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-Mcron-1.1-Released

[chilek]

> Overall though this is a relatively small update for GNU Mcron and still am not aware of many users of this particular GNU component.

It's almost sure that the main user of Macron is RMS ;-)

[nanonyme]

Is it pronounced like micron, mycron or maccron?

[GraysonPeddie]

Is it pronounced like micron, mycron or maccron?

* "Micro" -> "My cro"
* "Micron" -> "My cron"

That's how I would pronounce it.

[garegin]

Systemd has a cron replacement built in.

[brrrrttttt]

Is it pronounced like micron, mycron or maccron?

It's pronounced dead-on-arrival as garegin basically said above.

[F.Ultra]

Systemd has a cron replacement built in.

Kind of but it's a royal pain to setup compared with crontab since you must create a service file that executes what you want to run and then a timer file that launches the service file at the time specified. It does work nice for some things since you among other things get this nice "systemctl list-timers" command to see a list of active timers, when they launched, when they will launch next time and so on.

I have a compilation of daemons that I want to run under systemd and using the systemd timers for that is great, but it's no drop in replacement for cron.

[linuxgeex]

Anything that replaces Vixie needs to support timezones per crontab, which is really the only reason to run Vixie to begin with. Although I see them claiming "100% Vixie Compatible" I can't find any reference anywhere to support for timezones per crontab. What I did find was that you can write user crontabs in scheme. So if your intention is to buy into this piece of GNU ecosystem and forget backwards compatibility then these are the droids you are looking for.

For those of you who don't understand why supporting timezones per crontab is important, imagine this scenario:

You have datacenters in London, New York, and Sydney, and you have tasks you want to be run at 3am, 11am, and 7pm local time for each of those servers. New York houses your business logic datacenter and you want to collect and deliver stats from that server. You set up aggregation jobs on servers in each of the 3 datacenters, each running those jobs in its own timezone (because there's a customer-facing representation of the reports and they expect to see them at what they feel is the same time of day each day.) On the business logic server you have cron jobs to aggregate from those aggregates. The problem is that Daylight Savings changes on different days of the year for each timezone. Even if they didn't, it would be a bit complicated to try to specify "pull this data at 3am GMT" on a server running local time in New York, because on the day that DST starts/ends, it will happen at 2am GMT which then instantly becomes either 1am or 3am ... meanwhile the hour will not have changed in New York, so it will either happen an hour earlier or an hour later than expected. But your management doesn't care about that, they just want their reports *now*. There's various ways to work around this but by far the easiest is to run Vixie, set up one crontab per target time zone, and it will Just Work (tm).