GNU mcron 1.0.7

[dale_mellor]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hello

I am happy to announce the release of mcron-1.0.7.

Description
===========

The mcron program represents a complete re-think of the cron concept
originally found in the Berkeley and AT&T unices, and subsequently
rationalized by Paul Vixie.  The original idea was to have a daemon
that wakes up every minute, scans a set of files under a special
directory, and determines from those files if any shell commands should
be executed in this minute.

   The new idea is to read the required command instructions, work out
which command needs to be executed next, and then sleep until the
inferred time has arrived.  On waking the commands are run, and the
time of the next command is computed.  Furthermore, the specifications
are written in scheme, allowing at the same time simple command
execution instructions and very much more flexible ones to be composed
than the original Vixie format.  This has several useful advantages
over the original idea.  (Changes to user crontabs are signalled
directly to mcron by the crontab program; cron must still scan the
/etc/crontab file once every minute, although use of this file is
highly discouraged and this behaviour can be turned off).

   * Does not consume CPU resources when not needed.  Many cron daemons
     only run jobs once an hour, or even just once a day.

   * Can easily allow for finer time-points to be specified, i.e.
     seconds.  In principle this could be extended to microseconds, but
     this is not implemented.

   * Times can be more or less regular.  For example, a job that runs
     every 17 hours can be specified, or a job that runs on the first
     Sunday of every month.

   * Times can be dynamic.  Arbitrary Guile (scheme) code can be
     provided to compute the next time that a command needs to be run.
     This could, for example, take the system load into consideration.

   * Each user looks after his own files in his own directory.  He can
     use more than one to break up complicated cron specifications.

   * Each user can run his own daemon.  This removes the need for suid
     programs to manipulate the crontabs, and eliminates many security
     concerns that surround all existing cron programs.

   * The user can obtain an advance schedule of all the jobs that are
     due to run.

   A full discussion of the design and philosophy of mcron can be found
in the white paper at `http://www.gnu.org/software/mcron/design.html'.


Changes in 3.2.14: 23 April 2014
==========================

* Now runs (only) on top of guile-2.0 (was using guile-1.8).


Download
========
Gzipped tarballs are available from

 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mcron/
or
 http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mcron/

and its mirror sites.

The web site of GNU mcron is at:

 http://www.gnu.org/software/mcron/

 Dale Mellor
 GNU mcron Maintainer
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAlNecmMACgkQ5KKKrDEYI0JsGwCfVyJhq9jHVmVmJNR5F2mvkrR7
re8An0DbLx/ZgZxQ7xvqYo49x6DLSIcd
=uWaW
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----