From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jan 8 10:32:28 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from dt051n37.san.rr.com (dt051n37.san.rr.com [204.210.32.55]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 246EF37B727 for ; Mon, 8 Jan 2001 10:10:15 -0800 (PST) Received: from FreeBSD.org (Studded@master [10.0.0.2]) by dt051n37.san.rr.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA51902; Mon, 8 Jan 2001 10:10:10 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from DougB@FreeBSD.org) Message-ID: <3A5A0282.10EDAF5F@FreeBSD.org> Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2001 10:10:10 -0800 From: Doug Barton Organization: Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.12 i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Gordon Tetlow Cc: Gerhard Sittig , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: OT: silence as an answer? (was: how to test out cron.c changes?) References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Gordon Tetlow wrote: > > Hello there! > > On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Doug Barton wrote: > > Gerhard Sittig wrote: > [snip] > > > > Consider the following. We are in the spring and DST is "springing > > forward" at 2am. We have a job scheduled at 2:15 that takes one hour to > > run. There is another job scheduled at 3:20 that ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY > > cannot run unless the first job finishes. Aside from the fact that this > > is bad design, how should cron handle this situation? You can (and > > probably should) respond that this is not cron's responsibility, and > > come up with all kinds of ways to ameliorate this situation. My response > > will then be that if you can "fix" this situation without "fixing" cron, > > then cron doesn't really need to be "fixed." > > I think this is a really horrible example. It is impossible for FreeBSD to > expect to catch bad design on a local administrator's part. The admin > should implement some sort of semaphore (a file in /tmp) or just append > the dependent job to the first job. We can't insulate stupidity, at least > we shouldn't, otherwise FreeBSD is going to start looking more like > Windows. Thank you. You just made my point. Did you actually read the last two sentences of my paragraph? > I think that cron is broken because it doesn't handle DST shift properly. And I think your definition of "properly" is broken. Cron doesn't "handle DST" changes at all. It simply follows the system clock, which is 100% understandable and reproducable behavior. I don't want to have to guess what cron is going to do with any kind of time shift. > OpenBSD seems to get by with these changes just fine. I have a lot of > respect for them and I think if they come up with a good solution to the > DST problem, we should seriously consider it. I agree with your premise, however I do not agree that this is a "good solution." That is the point of contention here. Doug -- "The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment." -- Theodore H. White Do YOU Yahoo!? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message