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Cron as a filesystem
- mwcremer 12y agoAhem, meaning "manipulate crontab entries in a vfs" and not "store files in cron".
- SwellJoe 12y agoYeah, I considered changing the title to "File interface to cron" or something similar, but that also seemed to leave some of the reality out. It's just another element of the "everything is a file" philosophy of Plan 9, which I find very interesting and pragmatic, and wish were more common in the directions Linux is evolving in, with stuff like systemd, firewalld, systemd timers, etc.
- rcthompson 12y agoHow about "exposing cron as a filesystem"?
- SwellJoe 12y agoSounds like a Fox News title, where they expose cron to secretly be a filesystem. They'll call it "crongate".
- rcthompson 12y ago"What you need to know about Cron. News at 0 22 * * 1-5."
- SwellJoe 12y agoI find this an interesting experiment, as I am often struck by how much history seems to get forgotten. Plan 9 is pretty ripe for picking out lots of cool little things for integration into modern systems, but a lot of it doesn't seem to have resonated out into the world at large. It's unfortunate that Plan 9 wasn't Open Source from the beginning, as it might have been common enough to have inspired more stealing of ideas for other systems. As it is, we've got a lot of reinvention of ideas happening, often without much forward movement.
- Animats 12y agoThat reflects a mindset from an OS where the only data structure is a file system. When the only hammer you have is a file system, everything looks like a tree. Chrontab is a database and should be treated as such. The "everything is a file and files have no locking" mentality of UNIX doesn't scale well to continuously running systems.
- SwellJoe 12y ago"Chrontab is a database and should be treated as such." Why a database? "The "everything is a file and files have no locking" mentality of UNIX doesn't scale well to continuously running systems." I don't understand what argument you're making here. UNIX doesn't actually have "everything is a file" semantics (cron does not, for example, in the sense proposed by the article). Plan 9 mostly does, and it's actually kind of awesome. What part of Plan 9's semantics of everything is a network-transparent file "doesn't scale"? And, what do you mean by "doesn't scale"? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I genuinely don't understand what you're suggesting instead. What is an alternative cron implementation that is implemented as a database that "scales" better than something like this, by your definition? And, what is "scale" in this context?
- beberlei 12y agoEverything is a file doesn't scale to more than one system without resorting to hacks (Using NFS or the likes). One condition for a scalable system is a network interface imho. Cron doesn't have that as well, which usually leads to application level complexity to avoid running the same cron on multiple machines.
- SwellJoe 12y agoWhat!? Did you even read the article? It covers the fact that files are network transparent...i.e. every file is available everywhere on the network. You really should give the article a read and maybe read up on Plan 9 a bit. You're missing out on some really interesting stuff.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
- lamby 12y agoReminds me somewhat of Debian's /etc/cron.{daily,monthly,weekly,monthly}