anacron gone?

moose jaw · 2010-01-29 01:31:41

Anacron seems to be gone from the official repos. Not showing up in pacman searches for me, nor on the main page package search, plus aurcheck is now searching for anacron in the AUR (and not finding it, of course). Did this just happen? Is it connected to the possible impending switch from dcron to [bf]cron that I've read about elsewhere on the forum?

And, more to the point, can anyone recommend a more-or-less drop-in replacement? I use anacron on my laptop (which gets shut down every night and rebooted every morning) to run missed cron jobs. I suppose this is basically what cronwhip does?

ataraxia · 2010-01-29 02:59:27

We upgraded to dcron 4.x, which was formerly called yacron. This new cron doesn't need anacron. Merge the /var/spool/cron/root.pacnew as usual and you'll see how it works.

moose jaw · 2010-01-29 04:00:45

Aha, thanks for the reply. I seem not to have a .pacnew there, hmm. But things appear to be functioning as normal since my system updated to the new dcron on Jan 25. I'll just disable anacron and see what happens.

Edit: don't have a .pacnew 'cause I never altered the original /var/spool/cron/root, I suppose. Always read the wiki before speaking...

Last edited by moose jaw (2010-01-29 04:04:56)

Profjim · 2010-01-29 10:26:58

Hi, I'm the current dev of dcron. I agree that if one uses dcron, one doesn't need anacron (that's the whole point of much recent development in dcron).

However, I do think anacron should still be available, at least in aur, for users who don't have time to convert their anacrontabs, or who want to use another cron implementation instead.

So I've uploaded what I think is the most recent version of anacron to AUR. Hope there are no objections. I realized after doing it I left Eric Belanger's name as Maintainer, which I shouldn't have done, but that can be fixed.

Anacron hasn't seen an update in years, so this shouldn't be too hard to maintain :-). However, I won't be using it as myself so I hope someone else will come forward to maintain it.

moose jaw · 2010-01-29 14:45:49

Thanks for your reply, Profjim. For someone like me, who didn't alter the default settings for anacron at all and just used it to run missed jobs, it seems that the new version of dcron provides the exact same functionality, which is nice. But as you say, and as seems to be the general opinion around here, choice is good! (though duplication of functionality is maybe less good, so I'm just as happy to have uninstalled anacron with the new dcron now in place)

Last edited by moose jaw (2010-01-29 14:48:35)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-01-29 01:31:41

anacron gone?

#2 2010-01-29 02:59:27

Re: anacron gone?

#3 2010-01-29 04:00:45

Re: anacron gone?

#4 2010-01-29 10:26:58

Re: anacron gone?

#5 2010-01-29 14:45:49

Re: anacron gone?

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