minimizing footprint

[John Gilmore]

> We are talking of end users systems, how many kids will add a cron task?

I was more concerned with other Fedora packages that insert cron jobs
when they are installed.  But if Fedora gets the dependencies right,
rpm would install and run cron at the same time the package that needs
cron is installed, so that's not an issue (unless the package
dependencies are set to assume that cron is always part of the base
system).

The packages you're proposing to change are OLPC-specific packages
anyway, so the changes won't mess up any other Fedora installs.

I do see the point of removing unneeded daemons in every
memory-constrained laptop, and this does look like low hanging fruit.
On the Ubuntu system I happen to be typing on, 'cat /proc/nnnn/status'
shows cron taking 300k of resident RAM and 2.7Mb of virtual memory at
its peak (and I have a place to page out to, which most XO's don't).
The XO system will certainly be more responsive with another 2MB of
memory available for general paging; its worst performance bottleneck
was lack of DRAM when I last looked, and that situation has probably
gotten worse as the system grew.

My thought was that systemd probably wouldn't get much bigger if it
got a parser for cron files.  But your proposed change is less work,
though it only fixes the issue for XO's, not for other
memory-constrained systems.

	John