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

[From: Simon Budig]

Kimmo Hämäläinen (kimmo.hamalainen at nokia.com) wrote:
> I guess the 'API' is crontab(1) + crontab(5). It has probably been
> tested in the course of time and proven good and stable.

Uh, not if you have potentially multiple programs simultaneously
modifying the crontab. One faulty program could mess up your whole cron
environment and you don't really want that.

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

The crontab(1) command cannot add an entry to the crontab, all it can do
is pop up $EDITOR for the user to edit the crontab. Not what you want.

Glib also is not always a good idea: It can handle timeouts but does not
make any guarantees about them. Plus - as florian already mentioned - it
would require your program to run all the time and waste memory.

> 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.

I'd love to have an API call that enqueues an alarm at a specific time
(maybe even with a specific sound, but I doubt that it should provide
any dialog facilities, that would make it quite complex) that calls back
into the application via dbus. That would make it possible to disable
alarms globally (similiar to the flight mode - a "cinema mode"  :) and
would enable a list of scheduled alarms, regardless of the application
that scheduled it.

You'd have to hack a lot around crontab to enable all this and I doubt
that would be significantly less error prone than implementing that
stuff e.g. in the Desktop application or a new demon specific to that
task.

Bye,
        Simon
-- 
              simon at budig.de              http://simon.budig.de/