[systemd-devel] systemd user instance

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 05/06/2013 10:14 PM, Kai Krakow wrote:
> Jóhann B. Guðmundsson <johannbg at gmail.com> schrieb:
>
>>> But now I want to (and need to) give some users cron-like abilities. I
>>> discovered that systemd supports user instances - perfect!
>> Then install cronie...
> That's the obvious solution but a little bit counter-productive with respect
> to my question...


Systemd is not ready for users cron like behavior.

Not from a usability perspective ( complexity of time units vs cron's 
one liner ) and from the fact that there are cron features which cannot 
be support ( for now ) and of those that will not be supported.

I threw some ideas out there on the table in brno but how we might try 
to solve that ( from an user usability perspective ) but to do so, along 
with supporting few other things in the future like container ( startup 
) templates and the fact that the drop-in snippets in .d/*.conf does not 
scale very well ( due to it's own unit directory implementation ) I'm 
afraid we will need to rethink and reconstruct /etc/systemd/ directory 
structure sooner rather then later since it's slowly becoming too 
complex and ill manageable in the process.

Anyway basically just think of systemd timer units cron like 
implementation like systemd's (x)inetd replacement which only replaces 
it up to 80% - 90%

JBG