[drupal-docs] cron jobs in the install text

[Morbus Iff]

> Okay...  So why doesn't it say that the search module (for example) 
> needs it?  If I go to search's admin/help page, it doesn't say anything 
> about the cron job there either.  Here is this fairly essential drupal 
> thingy, but I bet ya'll get *tons* of questions about it.

Some notes:

  * cron in any webhosting situation is a big question-raiser mainly
    because it is rarely offered in a user-controlled way. A lot of
    times, a webhost will NOT offer cron at all (there are other
    webbased alternatives, however) or otherwise the user will have
    to call their webhost and wait in phone queues only to get
    some idiot crone who keeps telling you to look into your Win32
    "Scheduled Tasks" documentation. The roadblock isn't Drupal:
    it's the host in which your Drupal site is installed on.

  * Other modules may require cron access now or in the future,
    (I believe the statistics module clears out its access list
    every X days through cron). Maintaining a list of them could
    possibly become prohibitive. Granted, the cron section of the
    INSTALL could be enhanced to include "like the search functionality"
    or some other immediate example of "OoOoh! That's why I need it!"

  * Cron is in the INSTALL.txt because there is NO VISUAL INDICATION
    WITHIN Drupal that cron is, or is not, working. With the files/
    folder, a warning is flagged when you go to a particular admin
    page - it's a /reactive/ problem. With cron, however, there is
    no way that Drupal can detect whether cron is working or
    configured correctly. The most it could do is to check:

     * when the last time $module ran (if at all).
     * the interval $module SHOULD have run (which can only
       happen if you trigger the module somehow, like actually
       searching, or fiddling with the $module's settings, etc.).
     * if interval is less than the last time, put up a warning.

    But where would you put up the warning? How often do you, as a
    user, check your warning log? How often do you check your
    statistics settings? How would you be informed that the
    search.module hasn't indexed anything? There are no search
    module settings to "trigger", which would suggest that you'd
    have to enable a potentially broken feature on your site just
    to be informed that .. it .. is broken!

-- 
Morbus Iff ( insert pithy quote here )
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