[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Maemo Alarm/Notifier Interface

[From: Kimmo Hämäläinen]

Hi,

On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 17:12, ext Florian Boor wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> HimKimmo Hämäläinen wrote:
> 
> > Doesn't Glib has this kind of functionality already?
> 
> you can have recurring events with glib, yes... but that involves that you have
> the application running all the time. In combination with the fact that you
> can't have custom software packages starting up some deamon on boot this feature
> doesn't cover all the needs. In addition to this i think it would be much more

Looking at crontab(5) man page, cron allows you to execute a program
once in startup, so you could start some kind of daemon like that.

> convenient if you just set a time of an event instead of an interval, but thats
> my personal opinion.

You could have a shell script launched by cron that checks the current
time of day and, if the time is right, starts some program that plays
annoying alarm sound at full volume.

> 
> > I think the system/HW takes care of wakeups automatically.
> 
> That would make this part pretty easy :-)
> 
> > Instead of atd, we will use cron. So, we don't have an extra daemon in
> > the system. Alarms > 5min or something should use cron and faster alarms
> > implemented in the application (or in a library).
> 
> Will there be some defined API to use this? From the application developers
> point of view you don't want to care about which mechanism the system uses, you
> just want to make it right and working. If you want to see the correct solution
> accepted by the developers its absolutely necessary to provide a useful API.

I guess the 'API' is crontab(1) + crontab(5). It has probably been
tested in the course of time and proven good and stable.

> Do we have any experience on how cron influences power consumption? From what i
> see on my 770 we don't have it running in the current software image.

I assume it will sleep most of the time and poll once in a minute
(according to man page).

> > Nooooo! :) Isn't Glib+cron enough?
> 
> It depends on two questions:
> - Does it work?
> - How do you expose this to the application developers?

I think the application developer will use the crontab(1) command and
the Glib API.

We will try to re-use existing (preferably standard) software, so unless
cron is not enough, it will be preferred over some new daemon
implemented from scratch.

BR, Kimmo

> 
> Well... i know that i'm complicated :-)
> 
> Greetings
> 
> Florian