alt Hacker News"You just put numbers aligned with the titles."
That is not a fair summarization of their point because that is not the grammar. There's commas, slashes, asterisks, combinations, and then if you want randomization you need to put it in the command itself because cron can't do it. (Some crons can, but it's not a general capability of cron.) Writing a non-trivial cron spec is not easy.
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eqvinox • yesterday at 3:38 PM
How do you express those things in a systemd timer? E.g. run something 4x per day, */6 in cron.
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I am familiar with the syntax, so I am biased ("*/3" and "12,14,20" makes sense if you are familiar with Unix tools), but it is still more intuitive to me than the systemd unit file syntax and usage. I know that I just have to edit /etc/cron or throw any executable file into /etc/cron.d/monthly and it will work on my system, but I cannot write a systemd timer file from scratch without looking it, and to do that I first have to find the directory where the other examples are located. /etc/systemd doesn't appear to be it.
This is generally my only real complaint about systemd. I don't care if it is too monolitic, written in C or whatever, I just want a straightforward syntax for straightforward operations. I'd like it if systemd could recognize if a .target file is a shell script and just do "the right thing". Perhaps it would make sense for a timer file to recognize cron syntax as well. Or at least allow for a kind of extensibility so that I can have it supported.
If systemd had a little more respect for existing conventions, I am pretty sure it wouldn't be so controversial. After all, system administrators like it because they use it all the time, but a regular, full-timer user like me, who only deals with it when something is broken or have to use it as a means-to-an-end to set something up, then all friction is annoying and bad UX. (And no, using Nix is not the solution)