Bug#913583: Drop anacron from gnome-core (and task-desktop)

[Laurent Bigonville]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2018 18:28:37 +0100 Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org> wrote:

 > Hi,

Hello,

 >
 > investigating, why anacron is installed on my system, it seems to be
 > pulled in via Recommends of gnome-core and task-desktop.
 >
 > Looking for the original reason, why anacron was added, I found:
 >
 > meta-gnome3 (1:3.8+7) unstable; urgency=medium
 >
 > [ Josselin Mouette ]
 > * gnome-core recommends anacron, because some of the GNOME packages go»
 > to the brink of unusability if nothing rotate logs.
 >
 > The changelog for tasksel is not particularly helpful:
 >
 > tasksel (2.58) unstable; urgency=low
 >
 > [ Per Olofsson ]
 > * Add anacron to desktop task.
 >
 > Regarding log rotation: nowadays, logrotate ships a native .timer unit,
 > which handles this task in a much better way then anacron.
 >
 > Basically, all the important tasks afaics ship a native .timer unit
 > besides the legacy cron jobs, so we don't really need anacron anymore to
 > properly support systems which aren't running 24/7.
 >
 >
 > I therefor think we should consider dropping anacron from both
 > meta-packages, to have one less (useless) daemon installed by default.
 >

 > Thoughts, comments, concerns?

I'm actually not sure here.

There are other cronjobs that might need to be run on machines that are 
not running all the time, logrotation is only one of the case.

Also, anacron is not running as a daemon. cron or systemd (via a timer) 
starts anacron and anacron decides whether the jobs need to be run.