alt Hacker NewsPer other comments though, it looks like systemd's syntax when you want to specify something that's not just that one number is at least as complex.
Is your example (which I agree, looks cryptic) any less cryptic in systemd?
I asked jippity, and it said this:
[Timer]
OnCalendar=*-04,05,06,09,10,11-01 04..08,11:03/4,05:00
OnCalendar=Sun,Tue,Thu,Sat *-04,05,06,09,10,11-* 04..08,11:03/4,05:00
> Things like having control over whether or not long-running jobs are allowed to overlap
With cron that's just prefixing the command with `flock -n <lock>`, but sure the "pick somewhere to put the lock" is probably better with systemd.
> Having to re-write commands and scripts because CRON had its own special PATH
Why? Wouldn't you just put that in the crontab? I don't even see this as different. It's in the cron config or the systemd timer config.
The other improvements you mentioned seem good.
This is like a complaint about regex syntax. It's impossible to comprehend a non-trivial regex in a second or two. However, if you know the rules, it's trivial to step through it. What's the point of complaining? There's no representation that anyone could grok on first impression. This is much simpler than regex.
Nobody's prevented from using cron instead of systemd timers. The significant differences in typical relatively simple cases are ordering:
cron: M H d m Y DOW
systemd: DOW Y-m-d H:M:S [each part optional, with *, *, and 00:00:00 defaults]
And then, because - is taken, ranges use .. in systemd. Aside from that, it's mostly the same for typical cases of simple periodic timers. Even x/n and x-y/n for steps work similarly. Syntax for complex cases start to diverge, for jitter or special numerically-irregular DOW or DOM or multiple non-periodic times.
In your example, adding more spaces between the date and time parts would make it more visually digestible. There's also the .. range operator which jippity strangely didn't use for the month field even though it did for the hours field.