Scheduling subsystems (crontab, at) and the desktop

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Thu, 2004-07-22 at 14:55 +0200, Maciej Katafiasz wrote:
> W liście z czw, 22-07-2004, godz. 12:51, Philip Van Hoof pisze: 

> > I bring forward the question whether or not a (freedesktop.org)
> > specification is necessary for application scheduling software.
> [snip]
> > What do you people think?


> 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, and
> intended to come up with formal FD.o proposal in one of these days.
> Right now it's still in conceptual phase, with actual coding starting
> now. We'd totally love to cooperate with you guys for crontab support
> (which would be considered legacy source), so if you could drop by
> #eventuality at FreeNode on IRC, that would be great.
> I'm going to prepare much more detailed writeup in next few hours or so,
> so stay tuned :). Right now there's preliminary document available at
> http://zeus.polsl.gliwice.pl/~mathrick/spec.txt


I am very interested in such a crontab-replacement that is more
specifically designed for the desktop and that uses the proposed
architectures and technologies. It sounds like a very great idea to me.

I will try to get our developers interested in such a meeting. Perhaps
to create a maintenance or GUI system for this. Not sure, however, if a
GUI or maintenance tool would be suited for this type of scheduling. 

For example the idea to block messenger events while you are watching a
movie, en let the scheduler signal the application about it; so that it
can pop them up at the right time, sounds very interesting to me.

Or another possibility, to let Evolution set "reminders" in that
scheduler. And whether or not Evolution is running, the scheduler would
pop-up that reminder at the right time. Well, "at" is also suited for
this but one problem with "at" might be the availability on all desktop
systems and the fact that each "at" might or might not be implemented in
a different way.

And the fact that it's inconvenient to code this using "at". You'd have
to create a script and feed it to the commandline "at filename". Your
scheduler proposal sounds much more convenient.

"There are many possibilities just waiting to be explored."

Indeed


So thanks for letting me know about this future technology



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: Philip dot VanHoof at Cronos dot Be
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org