Scheduling subsystems (crontab, at) and the desktop

[Maciej Katafiasz]

W liście z czw, 22-07-2004, godz. 15:41, Philip Van Hoof pisze: 
> 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.

Great to hear that. You're 100% correct, in fact all that originated
from our desire to be able to plug evo into crontab :). But once you
think about one thing like that, it's hard to stop, and so was the idea
born.

Cheers,
Maciej, working on writeup for FDO

PS. Of course there is my stupid mistake, channel is
#eventuality at GIMPNet, not FreeNode. I'm dumb today ;)

-- 
"Tautologizm to coś tautologicznego"
   Maciej Katafiasz <mnews2 at wp.pl>
       http://mathrick.blog.pl