Le mer. 2 juil. 2025 à 17:35, Chris Hofstaedtler <z...@debian.org> a écrit : > > Without any particular hat: I would expect someone wanting to drop cron > > to come up with some analysis of what remains to be done and what is > > going to break if that were to be implemented.
Hi, this has been on the back burner for me for 10 years and наб did a systematical analysis of all the /etc/cron.... files shipped by every single package of the distribution. The result are the two heuristics table listed here: https://wiki.debian.org/systemd-cron For the other cron jobs it is assumed that the bare name matches the bare name of the timer. To check one system in particular, one needs to do # apt install systemd-cron -y; systemctl list-timers This will list two families of .timers : - the native ones. very common examples: * dpkg-db-backupt.timer, * man-db.timer, * apt-daily.timer, * fstrim.timer * e2scrub_all.timer * ... - the remaining generated one, from the /etc/cron* files: they all live in the cron-xxxxx.timer namespace and physicaly in /run/systemd/generator/ * cron-daily-aptitude.timer * cron-daily-popularity-contest.timer * cron-daily-google-chrome.timer * cron-monthly-check-dfsg-status.timer * ... Here the non free google-chrome-stable package is the only thing expecting a cron daemon to be there somehow and going to _break_ a little if it's not there. All the packages from the distribution seems to have the proprer "Depends: cron | cron-daemon" and won't break. I still think systemd-cron would be a better default for task-laptop; because it is said that traditional cron or the one in Debian would wake up the system every single minute to poll /etc & /var/lip/spool/cron/crontabs which is bad. I don't have hard proof for this. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915370#101 > Relatedly, cron Recommends: default-mta | mail-transport-agent, > which we kinda also no longer expect to be installed by default on a > default install anymore. Due to how debootstrap works today, the > Recommends: is very often not fulfilled. Nevertheless I doubt we > still expect an MTA to be part of the default install. That's the reason why systemd-cron Suggests: a MTA instead of Recommending one; so that people doing the switch do not get an extra MTA they don't what. If they wanted one they would have installed it already. A pre-installed MTA is fully supported. Greetings
