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

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 06:48:23PM -0800, David Strauss wrote:
> 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.
Also: send summaries of mailing list statistics on very first of the month,
12 am local time.

Or: start syncing Fedora repositories on Jan 15 1 PM EST.

> > 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.
Yeah, I think it is definitely at least worth investingating.

Zbyszek