Drop anacron from task-desktop and task-laptop

This dependency is no longer necessary as we have systemd .timer units nowadays. Such .timer units handle systems which don't run continuously in a much better way.

Closes: #915370

Hi Michael,

I'm not necessarily against that MR but I have some questions/remarks. I don't exactly know why anacron was introduced in the first place but one purpose I think is to run the cron.daily jobs provided by Debian when the system is started.

Do we have something which will do the same thing using systemd.timer? If not, we might introduce regressions by removing the anacron dependency.

cron is still installed. This MR doesn't change that. anacron (according to the comments in debian/control) was for systems which do not run 24/7. Say you have a cron job which is supposed to run at 06:30, but the system was shutdown at this point, you will not run that cron job.

Now, systemd.timers, if they are marked as persistent, do not have this problem: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.timer.html#Persistent=

I checked a typical desktop installation, and we have a native systemd timers for all important cron jobs. Probably most important is logrotate, which ships /etc/cron.daily/logrotate and /lib/systemd/system/logrotate.{service,timer}

cron is still installed. This MR doesn't change that. anacron (according to the comments in debian/control) was for systems which do not run 24/7. Say you have a cron job which is supposed to run at 06:30, but the system was shutdown at this point, you will not run that cron job.

That is the regression I'm afraid of if we remove anacron from the task list

I checked a typical desktop installation, and we have a native systemd timers for all important cron jobs. Probably most important is logrotate, which ships /etc/cron.daily/logrotate and /lib/systemd/system/logrotate.{service,timer}

But if we also provide systemd.timers for all important cron jobs we provide, I guess it's less of a regression. I guess we would still want anacron for people not using systemd, but default installs use systemd, right?

Correct, sysvinit users would probably want to install anacron. But sysvinit is a non-standard/non-default configuration, so I assume this is acceptable.

One other reason for removing anacron from the default task is that's unmaintained upstream and in Debian: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=897138

assigned to @holgerw

As I'm only really member of the project for task-xfce I'd like to have a comment from @holgerw so I'm assigning him the MR, but at least no objection from me.

I would be happy to merge this, if noone objects.

merged

mentioned in commit 2584c016

Now merged, MR done.