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You should write an episode of Seinfeld. I was a TL on a project and I had two "eng" on the project that would make test with a single method and then 120 line

You should write an episode of Seinfeld. I was a TL on a project and I had two "eng" on the project that would make test with a single method and then 120 lines of Tasmanian Devil test cases. One of those people liked to write 600 line cron jobs to do critical business functions. This scarred me.

ckastner 4y ago
> One of those people liked to write 600 line cron jobs to do critical business functions. I was a long-time maintainer of Debian's cron, a fork of Vixie cron (all cron implementations I'm aware of are forks of Vixie cron, or its successor, ISC cron). There are a ton of reasons why I wouldn't do this, the primary one being is that cron really just executes jobs, period. It doesn't serialize them, it doesn't check for load, logging is really rudimentary, etc. A few years ago somebody noticed that the cron daemon could be DoS'ed by a user submitting a huge crontab. I implemented a 1000-line limit to crontabs thinking "nobody would ever have 1000-line crontabs". I was wrong, quickly received bug reports. I then increased it to 10K lines, but as far as I recall, users were hitting even that limit. Crazy.
- kragen 4y ago
  Is Dillon cron a fork of Vixie cron?
  - ckastner 4y ago
    Hadn't heard of it before, and it appears not to be. There indeed exist a few non-Vixie-cron-derivative implementations but as far as I'm aware, all major Linux and BSD distributions use a Vixie cron derivative. Edit: I see now where I caused confusion. In my original post, I should have said all default cron implementations.
    - kragen 4y ago
      I thought Dillon cron was the default cron in Slackware? Hard to be a more major Linux distribution than Slackware, in terms of historical impact if not current popularity.
      - ckastner 4y ago
        Could be. Slackware is a popular name, but I would call it "niche" rather than a major distribution. Just my personal view, obviously.
        kragen 4y ago
        I just confirmed with a Slackware user today, it still does use Dillon cron. I had a vague memory from before I switched from Slackware to Debian late last millennium.
        ttkciar 4y ago
        It always gives me a spell of cognitive dissonance when someone points out that Slackware is no longer a "major" distribution. It used to be the major distribution. Funny how times change.

ckastner 4y ago

> One of those people liked to write 600 line cron jobs to do critical business functions. I was a long-time maintainer of Debian's cron, a fork of Vixie cron (all cron implementations I'm aware of are forks of Vixie cron, or its successor, ISC cron). There are a ton of reasons why I wouldn't do this, the primary one being is that cron really just executes jobs, period. It doesn't serialize them, it doesn't check for load, logging is really rudimentary, etc. A few years ago somebody noticed that the cron daemon could be DoS'ed by a user submitting a huge crontab. I implemented a 1000-line limit to crontabs thinking "nobody would ever have 1000-line crontabs". I was wrong, quickly received bug reports. I then increased it to 10K lines, but as far as I recall, users were hitting even that limit. Crazy.

kragen 4y ago
Is Dillon cron a fork of Vixie cron?
- ckastner 4y ago
  Hadn't heard of it before, and it appears not to be. There indeed exist a few non-Vixie-cron-derivative implementations but as far as I'm aware, all major Linux and BSD distributions use a Vixie cron derivative. Edit: I see now where I caused confusion. In my original post, I should have said all default cron implementations.
  - kragen 4y ago
    I thought Dillon cron was the default cron in Slackware? Hard to be a more major Linux distribution than Slackware, in terms of historical impact if not current popularity.
    - ckastner 4y ago
      Could be. Slackware is a popular name, but I would call it "niche" rather than a major distribution. Just my personal view, obviously.
      - kragen 4y ago
        I just confirmed with a Slackware user today, it still does use Dillon cron. I had a vague memory from before I switched from Slackware to Debian late last millennium.
      - ttkciar 4y ago
        It always gives me a spell of cognitive dissonance when someone points out that Slackware is no longer a "major" distribution. It used to be the major distribution. Funny how times change.