[Lvlug] cron woes on slackware

[Ricardo SIGNES]

At work, we use Debian.  Debian is OK, but I am happy (mostly) with
Slackware.  Debian used to use anacron, but now uses Vixie cron.
Slackware uses Dillon's cron.

Dillon's cron works, and has done its job for the last n years with no
major problems.  I don't its crontab(1), but I can cope.  The thing is,
Vixie cron has two killer features:

1. It can run /etc/crontab, the format of which allows the file to
specify the user as which to run the command.  I can have some system
user run a cronjob without giving that system user a crontab.  It makes
it easy to put all my system cronjobs in one place so I don't need to
use find(1) to find them.

2. It will run anything in /etc/cron.d/ as if it was a single-line
crontab file, so it's easy to have my personal programs update their own
cron jobs (via their make install) without touching /etc/crontab itself.

I want this!

Anacron does the first, but not the second, as far as I can tell.

First of all, it looks really had to actually find the canonical
location for cron, dcron, or anacron!  They're all ancient, and
maintained only by the distros that use them.  WTF!

I downloaded the cron (Vixie) source and the security patches from
Debian -- http://packages.debian.org/stable/admin/cron -- but it dies
horribly on my Slackware box.  Well, not horribly, but worse: silently.
strace seems to be complaining about writing to /dev/log, which is not,
on Slackware, a logging facility.  At least not on my old Slackware.

I can't even find a place to change the logging facility.

If anyone has any wisdom about using a better cron daemon on Slackware,
I am eager to hear it.

-- 
rjbs
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