Logrotate has a configuration trigger and if your system has systemd, it uses systemd timer.
Don't remove cron, some packages depend on it such as apt, etc. ^^;
Don’t remove cron
Oops, too late. It's just a very simple single purpose system - I can deal with broken things and removing cron on this box is kinda a test to see what breaks. I checked the apt cron jobs and they also seemed to be duplicated as systemd timers - but it wasn't a very thorough check. My logs show apt-daily.service being run daily by systemd.
Debian the kinda system to have both just in case, what gets removed along with cron when you try?
what gets removed along with cron when you try?
# apt-get --dry-run purge cron cron-daemon-common
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
cron* cron-daemon-common*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Purg cron [3.0pl1-162]
Purg cron-daemon-common [3.0pl1-162]
nothing!
Nice, I'll bet a bunch of long time users probably want cron, I mean like I had to deal with a ticket yesterday, user crying about telnet not being included in latest release. (But that's not debian related)
Debian Developers are prone to add their own bits with the upstream package. Sometimes it is very useful, sometimes not. They add the relevant systemd units in and turn them on for you and also set up the cron jobs according to which dev prepared the package.
You don't have to install systemd with Debian (I think?). The row when systemd started to gain traction and DDs debated its inclusion for ages lead to a strange set of decisions, IMHO, about the filesystem layout, which is quite different to what a systemd person would expect, to make it work with the other low level system that is being used.
I thought I saw that sysv stuff is being marked for being removed from the kernel at some stage. Am I imagining that? I don't know what the alternative init systems are now.
Anyway, Debian is a fine distro.
Suggest you run a desktop with prioritised apt-pinning on Testing and Sid. It makes it semi-rolling and it's stable as anything. The community makes sure that less than an hour goes past before someone posts a solution to a package error and for that reason I suggest that you always install the apt package scripts which provide the change logs and known bugs with that package before you hit install.
The feedback from the community upstream to the DDs is amazing.
I hope aptitude - an apt TUI - is still being used as that's one of my favourite ever Debian utilities; a lot of the packages show as hard dependencies when you install them individually but are actually covered by other packages already installed; you can reduce the unused packages in your system by marking the packages auto installed yourself in aptitude very easily. There are several other packages in the repos to do all manner of interesting things. The community spirit is very very strong.
Good luck and have fun.
I found that starting with a debootstrap minimal install from a live distro (I like ArchLinux as a rescue usb, but there are plenty of others on distrowatch.com) and adding a kernel was the best way to go to try to keep the numbers of packages down in my Debian systems. YMMV. My experience was coming up to a decade ago now though, although lots of hardware vendors always love their Debian; UniFi was a Debian fan last time I looked at the controller.
Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.