Auto startup (crontab) on *nix

[guest]

Freenet insert a crontab entry to start Freenet on boot on *nix systems at least. Unknown if they use Windows voodoo to achieve the same on Windows.

I2P should do this.

[zzz]

crontab is for periodic tasks, not boot tasks. Our PPA package does offer to install as a service. To put that into the cross-platform installer sounds difficult.

[guest]

yes this is the wrong way. kytv wrote many service methods for different init systems into i2prouter script also.

[killyourtv]

Freenet's installer adds the following to the crontab of the user that installed Freenet.

@reboot   "$FREENET_INSTALLATION_PATH/run.sh" start 2>&1 >/dev/null #FREENET AUTOSTART - 8888

While some apparently like it, I was *pissed* when I saw that Freenet added that cronjob _withoutanyprompting_. :P

If we decide this is a good idea, IMHO:
1) It has to be opt-in;
2) We'd have to be careful not to clobber the user's existing crontab due to variations in how cron is called on $OS;
3) Is @reboot supported by other cron daemons than Vixie's cron? If not, will crond ignore it and continue, or will it be like some of the picky *BSD daemons and stop working all together?

Personally, I'd prefer this to be fixed with documentation explaining how to start I2P automatically in Windows, Linux (cron, sysvinit, systemd), FreeBSD, OSX, etc.