Re: cron(8) improvement

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013, at 11:37, Nikolai Lifanov wrote:
> On 11/05/13 12:31, Allan Jude wrote:
> > This came up in discussion on IRC and I thought I should throw it at the
> > list so I don't forget.
> > 
> > A user was asking how to do what linux cron does, where there is a
> > directory /etc/cron.d/ that packages and add files to to create crontabs.
> > 
> > Making FreeBSD's cron (Vixie Cron) include /etc/cron.d/ and
> > /usr/local/etc/cron.d/ in the /etc/crontab format seems like a very
> > useful feature, especially for pkg(8) as it makes it easy and safe to
> > programatically add and remove crontabs as part of a package.
> > 
> > 
> 
> Shouldn't we encourage packages to use periodic(8) when possible?
> 

Yes but our default periodic configuration in /etc/crontab is only
configured to be as granular as daily. If this is something that should
run hourly or at very strange intervals then cron is a better choice.

If the application is installing its own user they could install their
own crontab file in /var/cron/tabs. I'm certain I've seen a couple ports
do this.