Why not just use cron for this? Yes, the syntax for this does look a lot cleaner, but cron really isn't that hard to use. Why add another layer of complexity (which may break and be difficult to debug) when you could simply add lines to a crontab?
Bonus feature: "USING THE "—write-crontab" OPTION WILL COMPLETELY OVERWRITE ANY EXISTING CRONTAB ENTRIES!"
Wow. I like Ruby but many in the community's obsession with reinventing the wheel (with slightly more syntactic sugar and a hip github page) is pretty difficult for me to understand.
Why not just keep the crontab file in your repo? A rake task that does `cp #{project_dir}/crontab /etc/crontab` would be sufficient to meet the same needs.
Whenever simply generates your crontab file for you using a cleaner syntax. It hasn't reinvented anything or added any complexity. You are just using cron.
Indeed, Ruby fans (I refuse to call them "Rubyists") love to talk about how Ruby is a great language for creating DSLs, which is true, but that doesn't mean you should create a new DSL for everything just because you can.
in this specific case, it's a bit more than 'just because you can'. Maybe it can be more like 'just because you don't want to have bugs popping around when you add new servers to your infrastructure because you forgot to setup a cronjob'
also, other languages usually offer the same kind of stuff - like Java EE's cron-like mechanisms, for instance (with or without DSLs)..
Bonus feature: "USING THE "—write-crontab" OPTION WILL COMPLETELY OVERWRITE ANY EXISTING CRONTAB ENTRIES!"
Wow. I like Ruby but many in the community's obsession with reinventing the wheel (with slightly more syntactic sugar and a hip github page) is pretty difficult for me to understand.