Cron Provider?

Tomáš Smetana tsmetana at redhat.com
Thu Mar 7 14:36:13 UTC 2013


On Thu, 07 Mar 2013 08:42:41 -0500
Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:

> >> So yes, we *could* build a scheduling provider, but I think we
> >> want to think very hard about what level of scheduling we want to
> >> support. systemd's scheduler is a very large superset of what
> >> cron is capable of, so I suppose we could build that first and
> >> then extend it later to support the advanced systemd features.
> > 
> > Starting with cron would also have the advantage of building the
> > most portable code first; it would make sense to add the more 
> > version-specific options later.
> > 
> 
> While I agree with that in principal, I need to make the point that
> I'm not sure we can build a CIM model for cron that will extend to the
> systemd approach at all. They may ultimately need to be two separate
> models, at which point we'll need to figure out how to manage the
> transition (which is what OpenLMI is trying to avoid).

Cron might be an interesting modelling exercise... There are user crontabs,
scripts in /etc/cron.{hourly,weekly,monthly}, package-specific crontabs
in /etc/cron.d, system-wide /etc/crontab.  And we might want to model and
monitor the running/finished jobs as well.  I admit I don't know much about
systemd timer units. However I suppose systemd might make it easier to find
logs of a particular job run at least (and this would be a required feature I
assume).

I'm only afraid that both the cron and systemd are config-files driven and we
probably won't avoid parsing/editing the files. Which is ugly.

Regards,
-- 
Tomáš Smetana
Platform Engineering, Red Hat


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