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

[Rodrigo Moya]

On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 11:33 +0200, Maciej Katafiasz wrote:
> W liście z czw, 22-07-2004, godz. 14:55, Maciej Katafiasz pisze: 
> > Just to let you know, we're working on modern replacement for cron, but
> > with much wider scope that just scheduling and fully DBUS based
> [snip]
> > I'm going to prepare much more detailed writeup in next few hours or so,
> > so stay tuned :).
> 
> As promised, here is a tad longer description of Eventuality framework.
> If I'm not clear enough, please ask, I'll gladly provide you with
> answers, but I hope that together with what was already said in this
> thread, you'll get good overview of the idea.
> 
> Eventuality is framework designed for, amongst other things, replacing
> legacy cron jobs as means of performing prescheduled actions. This is
> however only small part of what is the intended functionality for
> Eventuality.
> Basically, framework is functionally split up into three parts:
> - one that lets "producer" apps register actions they support. For
> example, movie player can have "PlayMovie()" action, with parameters
> like "URL" (string), "Fullscreen" (boolean) and "Volume" (float).
> Interested apps can later query for supported apps, and use them in
> their own events
>
this is great! We miss though, if you are going to use d-bus, a good
query mechanism, so that we can query all the installed actions without
having to start individual applications.

> - although desktop oriented, Eventuality is meant to be sysadmin's tool
> as well. That's why we'll struggle hard to not to require any
> GUI-specific hacks, nor other things that would make it unwieldy for
> sysadmin
>
as you said in the document you posted before, the UI can be dinamically
generated from the description of the methods returned by each
individual application. That should work pretty well for simple types,
but not so well for other types. So I would suggest there is additional
information on each argument, like the allowed range, the set of valid
values, if it's a file, what kind of file it is (if it's an image, for
instance, show a preview, etc), ...

That would solve the UI problem, since building the UI automatically for
any desktop/toolkit would be quite easy.

all this sounds really good, and something I have been wanting for long
(the scriptability stuff specially), so, when are you releasing it? :)
No, seriously, is there any code written yet? where is it?

cheers