[bug-gcron] gcron status question

[del Solar, Bill]

Is the gcron project alive?

Your goals are good, but a cron replacement ought
to be more instead of merely plug compatible.

I work at a company where we start processes around
the clock from Sunday evening through late Friday
afternoon to coincide with trading hours in the
exchanges of the US, Europe, and Asia.

We face several problems which for cron on our Solaris
systems is not well suited:

(1) Our systems use local time.

(2) We run our trading processes under user IDs
which have appropriate TZ values for their exchanges
because we need to timestamp things with the time
in which they operate.

(3) Unfortunately, we must translate all starting
times to local times because cron itself uses the
TZ of the system.

(4) To complicate matters, we must cope with Daylight
Saving Time which starts and ends at different times
around the world.

It would be very nice to have a super cron that is
able to handle crontab entries in a user's own TZ
and translates them to cron's own TZ.

It would be even nicer to have cron interpret starting
times for all timezones correctly including Daylight
changes.

It would be desirable to have a list of exceptions
when something should not be run despite the fact that
the cron specification says that it ought to run:
Exchanges are open from Monday through Friday except
for national holidays.

We cope with holidays in thirteen countries.  We do it
by having an isMarketDay predicate which must return
true to allow a crontab command line to run successfully.

We are not trying to do anything fancy, but we are
running a trading operation around the clock and around
the globe from one location.

In the realm of wishful thinking, it would be really
nice to be able to have cron jobs run only after other
cron jobs have run successfully.  Of course, that
implies delaying the start of some jobs with dependencies
with alerts issued when failures occur.

Continuing to dream, it would also be extremely nice
to be able to start processes at the right time on
a different computer.

Bill del Solar
SAC Capital Management, LLC
540 Madison Avenue, 10th floor
New York, NY 10022
212-813-8641 voice
212-826-1548 FAX

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