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

[From: Kimmo Hämäläinen]

On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 19:05, ext Florian Boor wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Kimmo Hämäläinen wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> that might be an option... as soon as we have cron which is currently not available.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Thats a hack, not a feature and leads exactly to the situation we want to avoid.

cron also allows you to specify a specific time of day.

> > I guess the 'API' is crontab(1) + crontab(5). It has probably been
> > tested in the course of time and proven good and stable.
> 
> .. for a completey different usecase: We are not talking about software for a PC.

What was the problem here? We are trying to use 'PC' software where we
can...

> > I assume it will sleep most of the time and poll once in a minute
> > (according to man page).
> 
> I suppose thats too frequent to avoid power drain, iirc we had a problem like
> this with the panel clock. Apart from this i think the resolution of one minute
> is too low...

I would first wait for complaints from use time experts. Once a second
was bad, I'm not sure about once a minute. (Btw. every time you have
threads running in Nokia 770, they poll once every other second, because
of the thread implementation in libc.)

> 
> > I think the application developer will use the crontab(1) command and
> > the Glib API.
> 
> I don't think the crontab command is an acceptable interface for GUI
> applications, we would need a library offering a proper API.

Yes, I think that could be done. (I'm softening here.)

> > 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 think we are talking about two different things - the implementation of a
> service and a service API.

I was just stating there something about reusing old software etc.

BR; Kimmo

> 
> Greetings
> 
> Florian