[traverseda]

I think that's probably a trade off that large enterprises often make. It tends to work well for very large teams, and especially if you're trying to make your tech team fungible. Still, there's such a thing as taking it too far.

I think there's a middle ground. Sure, a single crontab makes it hard for packages to schedule things and makes it hard to assign ownership to individual packages/people/whatever. I can recognize that, and how it would be a problem for a large enterprise or even just for software developers who want to bundle some kind of cronjob with their package.

What you could do instead of a crontab is have one folder with a bunch of services/timers in it, where each file represents a single service that needs to be run. It would mean that you can still understand all of what's going on timer wise by looking carefully at one source, but you can still assign different services/timers to different people/packages/organizational-units/whatever.

Splitting each individual cronjobs into 2 different files is just crazy from where I am. Like you already have a bunch of different service types, at least give us the option to use a "periodic-oneshot" service type instead of this craziness. There's no need to have different packages/people responsible for a service and its timer, and if there is some edge case where it is you can still have ssperate timer services just they can live in a separate periodic-oneshot service file and use the original service as a dependency.

There's separation of concerns and then there's this. Take any principle too far and you get some craziness, and systemd has most of the infrastructure needed to solve this in a much more elegant way. Like at some point it has to just be bad design and not just different priorities, right?

[phpisthebest]

>>Sure, a single crontab makes it hard for packages to schedule things and makes it hard to assign ownership to individual packages/people/whatever.

and makes is hard for admins to schedule things, and make is hard to figure out what is scheduled when, and makes it hard to test if the process will work under the schedule.

I absolutely hate cron's format, and pretty much everything else about it. systemd timers is a WONDERFUL and absolutely needed change to the world of linux administration.

cron was written in a time where verbosity had actual costs to the system, we are not in those times and the need for nostalgia to be cryptic and only use minimum chars is over and I for one am glad for it.

Both in programming and administration people need to be MORE VERBOSE not less

[traverseda]

Well I'm not complaining about systemd's verbosity here, I generally agree on that point. Nor am I saying cron is particularly good, I think there's definitely room for improvement.

What I am saying is that splitting a basic timer between two different files is really bad for readability and understandability.

[phpisthebest]

You are not splitting a timer between 2 files

you are splitting a service and a timer, not all services need a timer. I think that is point being glossed over

services may be called by a target, a timer, or manually. or all 3 when the need arises.

So for example if I have a process that I need to run on startup, every Friday, and sometimes adhoc I can create a single service file and do all 3, and know it is executed in the same way every time

could not do that with cron or even older init systems