Arch Linux

It is already known that cron workers will begin crashing after libc has been upgraded, due to symbol mismatches and delayed loading and all that.

Currently every users has to discover this on their own, and produce their own solutions/workarounds such as making a pacman hook, or using scripts from -contrib, or having a sticky note that says "restart cron", or just rebooting after every upgrade.

Practically the only affected service is cron – this does not occur with most other long-running services. Additionally, cron is generally safe to restart, as cronie.service has KillMode=process. Therefore I propose that cronie should start using a pacman hook to automate this restart.

Proposed hook:

===
[Trigger]
Operation = Upgrade
Type = File
Target = usr/lib/libc.*
Target = usr/lib/libpam.*

[Action]
When = PostTransaction
Description = Restarting cronie for libc upgrade...
Exec = /usr/bin/systemctl try-restart cronie
===

This post brought to you by, yet another Arch system where I forgot to copypaste the .hook and it missed several days of cronjobs.