[systemd-devel] Feature request: schedule jobs for last day of month

[David Strauss]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:17 PM, Kay Sievers <kay at vrfy.org> wrote:
> Many of the things in iCal we *really* don't want or need, like the
> re-occurrence counters we would need to store and we likely don't want
> that kind of state, the time zones which I think we should entirely
> ignore for a system service, weird things like dependencies on the Mon
> vs. Sun start of the week.

Recurrence counts don't require any state. iCal just computes N
recurrences since the start data and time. If they get missed, it's
handled the same way as if cron has a job scheduled for Sundays and
the computer is turned off that day. That said, I don't find this
capability too useful.

Time zones actually can be useful for scheduling heavy jobs around low
utilization times. Work and utilization schedules follow DST changes.

> It all sounds a bit like a "I do because I can" thing, because it
> looks easy to plug in a library that says it does all that, but is
> that really something needed and useful for a system service to
> schedule?

The first question is if we want to support business-style scheduling
based on things like the "first Friday of the month" or "10 days
before the end of the trimester." If so, iCal RECUR is the obvious
path forward.

It's not about being someone's personal calendar as much as
recognizing the role service scheduling has in business.

--
David Strauss
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