[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Maemo alarms ==> retutime

[From: David D. Hagood]

Igor Stoppa wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 13:29 +0200, ext Nils Faerber wrote:
> [snip]
>> And even worse since the alarms can only be set <24h in advance does
>> that indeed mean that every application that wants to use alarms would
>> have to handle this nasty 24h hopping on its own? I.e. if the alarm is
>> more than 24h in the future then set an alarm for <24h, then check again
>> and set a new alarm until it is less than 24h away?
>> 
>> That is messy, indeed.
> Sure. A framework would help but the hw limitation is still there.
> 

I've dealt with this sort of limitation in some embedded systems I've 
developed, and it's really not a problem *if* you have a central entity 
managing the alarms - you just maintain a list of alarms, sorted in 
order of firing time. Every time the list changes, you re-evaluate the 
head of the list (first alarm to fire) and set the hardware up accordingly.

So if there were a service that apps registered themselves with, and 
that service maintained the list, then the problem is solved.

And, in the spirit of being as "Unix-y" as possible, if that service 
supplied cron/at support as well, then that would be even better.