This rant seems out of character, but personally I appreciate it. People are always suggesting getting rid of cron, but I have always liked and trusted it. I prefer using tools that are old, battle-tested, and standard, but I do try to appreciate the advantages of new things. Cron seems to be a favorite target of NIH, for as long as I remember but especially in these days of "serverless", so it's easy to second-guess my appreciation for it. Thanks for clarifying where their problems really were. There seems to be a common temptation to think a new tool will solve your problems, when really many are in the irreducible specificity of your own code or systems.
Cron2English looks very helpful for folks who struggle to read lines in a crontab.
I recognize that it is a sore spot for me when people re-invent the wheel when it seems clear they didn't have to and even clearer that the energy spent re-inventing the wheel would have been better (in terms of using the wheel) spent learning why the wheel is the way it is.
It is sort of the Chesterson's Fence of computer science. Don't tell me its wrong, tell me how it is right for what it does and where it falls short for what you want it to do. Cron gets a bad rap here, as did sendmail for that matter. When taken to extremes you replace working systems like init with systems that are borked like systemd. No doubt cron is on the list of things to be absorbed by the systemd borg at some point. Yes, it makes me grumpy.
IMO cron is one of the parts that a good process management system should solve. With systemd timers I can do stuff like require other processes to run for a timer to run, activate a process either on a timer or on a socket, specify that it runs in a private chroot/netns/cgroup. These are all common things that I might usually want a process or service to do, and putting timed, manual, socket and path invocation of a service in the process management system makes sense to me.
I understand some of the systemd criticism, but I don't at all understand why you want something else to manage your processes than the process management system (which is basically always the init system)?
> I understand some of the systemd criticism, but I don't at all understand why you want something else to manage your processes than the process management system (which is basically always the init system)?
Perhaps you don't understand one of the fundamental, philosophical criticisms, which is that it violates the Unix tenet of "do one thing and one thing well".
Timing, and scheduling are difficult and (arguably, of course), deserve their own, separate utility.
Cron isn't a process manager, any more than and interactive shell [1]. It just starts processes (and passes output to a local email client, though that's, understandably, brittle).
I wouldn't object to moving the process-starting functionality out of cron and leaving it with only the ability to tell init to "start job named XYZ", but I do object to just integrating its core competency of scheduling into that init.
[1] Arguably less than, considering modern shells' job control and signal facilities
EDIT: Oh by the way, Ruby folks struggling with cron might appreciate this: https://github.com/pjungwir/cron2english/