[fdo] Re: Scheduling subsystems (crontab, at) and the desktop

[Avery Pennarun]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 08:10:55PM +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> So if I understand the draft (you are working on a more complete one I
> understood), it will be a lot like the gconf-system. But not for
> configuration data, but for schedulable actions.

Shameless plug: you could use UniConf for this by creating a special
"crontab" backend, and then even access it via gconf if you wanted.

But seriously, I think this project is a bit misguided.  You're saying two
things:

 1. Nobody wants to schedule events using command-line tools.
 
 2. Users need to have control over which environment variables are set at
    the time their weird daily-event command line is run.

These two points are incompatible, which is why nobody ever uses programs
like kcrontab.  Either stick with the command line (at/crontab), or stay
away from it (programs that actually do stuff should have a UI for
scheduling events).

If you're going to do the latter, then providing an easy API and/or other
standard to make it easy for apps to tie into scheduling will make sense,
but the gnome app you've been writing won't help anyone.  If you do the
former, the gnome app you've been writing will still not help anyone, and
you'll be correct that normal users still won't be able to schedule events.
 
So I agree that something has to be done here, but make sure you think
carefully about the user requirements first.

Have fun,

Avery