On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 03:24:15PM -0400, Charles Schmidt wrote: > On Sat, 2004-07-24 at 11:30, Paul Kuliniewicz wrote: > > The only thing like this that Google seems to know about is > > http://www.cs.duke.edu/~reynolds/gat/, which is for GNOME 1.4 and no > > signs that it's still being developed. > > Actually, if you download the release on that webpage, it does use GNOME > 2.x. Or, you can try: http://gnome-schedule.sourceforge.net/ I've looked at both briefly. gat segfaults when it tries to read my crontab and I can't get gnome-schedule to run at all (it seems to think X isn't running; maybe a python problem). Both those problems look like straightforward graphical frontends to at and cron. That alone may not quite be sufficient for a GNOME task scheduler. I imagine that there's three general types of tasks: 1. Tasks that should only run if you're currently logged in. If not, they should be ignored entirely. (For example, a Rhythmbox alarm.) 2. Tasks that should only run if you're currently logged in, but should be delayed until you do log in to run. (For example, an event reminder.) 3. Tasks that should be run even if you aren't logged in. They'd pretty much be confined to non-graphical programs. (For example, starting wget at two in the morning because that's the only time the server isn't overloaded.) A GNOME task scheduler would definitely need to handle cases 1 and 2. Case 3 could probably be ignored, since I don't imagine it'd be very common, would only be used by advanced users, and can be handled just fine with good old at and cron anyway. You might be able to implement the task scheduling itself in at and cron, if you wrap the commands to be executed with some program that checks to see if the user is currently logged in and then conditionally decides to actually run the task. Case 2 could be handled by putting deferred tasks onto some list, and as part of login the list is checked for tasks that need to be run. Any additional task information (like descriptions) could be stored either as additional arguments to the is-this-user-logged-into-GNOME wrapper, since cron might not support comments and at almost certainly wouldn't. > I'm not sure if either though has a Bonobo interface, which would be a > really neat idea. A Bonobo interface is the difference between just a cron front-end and a general-purpose task scheduler for GNOME.
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