Bug#752376: Bug#758034: apticron: ok to Depend on cron-daemon rather than cron?

[Alexandre Detiste]

> > I'm not a fan of systemd-cron(*); I was going to ask to switch the
> > dependency from cron to cron-daemon, but that wouldn't be feasible because
> > systemd-cron is a __broken__ replacement for cron (until bug 752376 is
> > fixed), so I proposed running apticron in cron.daily to work around that
> > issue.
> > 
> > Since it's systemd-cron's fault:
> > - the "clean" solution would be to depend on cron-daemon with a note
> > (changelog, "Breaks:", whatever) that systemd-cron needs to be fixed

Hi,

systemd-cron is indeed now a broken replacement for cron
and should be replaced by something that combines the functionality
of systemd-cron that provides /etc/cron.[hourly|daily|weekly|monthly]/
& systemd-crontab-generator (not yet packaged) that processes /etc/cron.d/ (Debian packages' crontabs)
and /var/spool/cron/crontabs/* (user crontabs ).

Then, the file /etc/crontab would then not contains theses standard "boilerplate" lines anymore
> 17 *    * * *   root    cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
> 25 6    * * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )
> 47 6    * * 7   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly )
> 52 6    1 * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly )
and will be empty by default.

This also need systemd >  212 for the "Persistent=true" feature.
and 214 has just arrived last week in experimental
so there is still hope that it goes in Jessie.

I don't think this fits the needs of both current upstreams,
so I'll come with my own proposal.

This would provide both cron-daemon & virtual package anacron .

(It seems basically impossible to makes a cron based on systemd co-exist with anacron.)

Upstream repositories:
https://github.com/dbent/systemd-cron
https://github.com/kstep/systemd-crontab-generator