Scheduling subsystems (crontab, at) and the desktop

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Thu, 2004-07-22 at 14:55 +0200, Maciej Katafiasz wrote:

> 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


I have been discussing the proposal with Gaute Hope, another developer
of gnome-schedule.

So if I understand the draft (you are working on a more complete one I
understood), it will be a lot like the gconf-system. But not for
configuration data, but for schedulable actions.

Applications can then subscribe to such actions, and they will get
triggered. 

gnome-schedule's rule could fulfill the rule gconf-editor plays for
gconf. If, of course, this is the architecture in mind.

Right now we are displaying both at and crontab records in a single-line
per record Columned GtkTreeView. In the advanced view we just show the
type (at or crontab). We tried to keep the details about which daemon is
being used as abstract as possible.

The new layout would show a Tree for each application that has events
registered on the system. And two extra trees for the crontab and the at
daemons.

-----------------------------------+-----------------+-----------------
Description                        | Data            | Time or frequency
-----------------------------------+-----------------+-----------------
Evolution 1.5                      .                 .
  -> Reminder                      | Go to school    | Today at 15:00
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -+- - - - - - - - -+- - - - - - - - -
  -> Get new E-mail                | pop.provider    | Every 10th minute
-----------------------------------+-----------------+-----------------
Gaim Messenger                     .                 .
  -> Message                       | <from></from>.. | At event 
                                   |                 | screensaverstop
-----------------------------------+-----------------+-----------------
At daemon                          .                 .
  -> Application                   | play gotosch.mp3| Today at 15:00
-----------------------------------+-----------------+-----------------
Crontab daemon                     .                 .
  -> Application                   | backup.pl       | Each month
-----------------------------------+-----------------+-----------------

Or something like that



-- 
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