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0 pointssimoncion18d ago0 comments

> I take it that your position is: cron works for me, so why migrate to another system that uses its own "weirdo" syntax.

I'll repeat my opinion, as expressed in my first post:

  To do nontrivial scheduling you'd use the entirely-obvious-and-intuitive syntax described at [0]. For example:
  
    Mon,Fri *-01/2-01,03 *:30:45
  
  Who'd ever want to go back crontab format for nontrivial scheduling? [1]

  [0] <https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.time.html#Calendar%20Events>
  [1] This question is sarcasm. SystemD is often like this... dead simple things look dead simple, but complex things are -if they're possible at all- at least as complex as they are everywhere else.

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harshreality17d ago

System cron can't implement your example, so I guess what you say is technically true... EINVAL is more obvious and intuitive than <systemd calendar incantation>. Cron just can't do what you want.

You keep saying systemd calendar format is "at least as complicated", but it seems to me the converse is true. Simple cases are simpler to represent in systemd because fields are optional in various circumstances; complex cases, where they can be implemented in system cron at all, look equivalently complex. Removing the weekday constraint, rounding to minutes, and removing the star for year since it's optional:

    31 * 01,03 01/2 *
    01/2-01,03 *:31

What's the point of your gripes? Would you really suggest to someone, who has a systemd-based distro, to spin up systemd-cron or cronie and keep writing crontabs? Do you have some specific complaint about systemd calendar syntax that you think could be improved?

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