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

[From: Nils Faerber]

Weinehall David (Nokia-M/Tampere) schrieb:
> On mån, 2006-07-31 at 07:05 -0500, ext David D. Hagood wrote:
>> 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.
> We have solved all (hopefully) the technical problems by design
> workarounds (such as the need of wakeups every 24h to re-program the RTC
> alarm if there are pending alarms), but releasing an implementation
> simply wasn't prioritised for the 2006 edition of the software.

OK, where does that lead us now?

Do I understand this right that you/Nokia have an implementation, right?
And this implementation is still locked in some desk because it is not
ready for production (yet), right?

Well, then I would propose two steps:

 - First, document somewhere what *is* existing concerning alarm with
the current IT2006 edition, no matter how limited it is. This issue has
been a FAQ for almost a year now and it would help to avoid n-th times
asked questions.

 - Second put that "internal" implementation somewhere so that it can be
enhanced and productised by the community, like e.g. Garage.
If you do not do so I see the danger that the community might not be
willing to wait for a next IT2007 edition which might eventually have
the framework in place (or may not). But instead we might end up with
double effort, i.e. the community develops such a framework, uses it
until you/Nokia release your version and the community version will
become obsolete - very annoying.


> Regards: David
Cheers
  nils faerber

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