Re: Cron Provider?
Hi,
On Thu, 2013-03-07 at 07:37 -0500, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
On Wed 06 Mar 2013 06:59:44 PM EST, Russell Doty wrote:
> Do we need to consider a cron Provider?
>
Consider? Yes. Actually do it right now? No, not at all.
The issue is that cron's future is uncertain. It will remain in use in
the real world for many years at the least (and most likely we'll
retain legacy support for it in the future) but there is a new player
in this field. systemd recently added the ability to manage scheduled
events, and it does so with a language that is much closer to that of
a calendaring program's scheduling than it is to cron. So my major
concern here is that there may not be a way to model the scheduling
provider (let's call it that, rather than cron provider) in such a way
that it can account for both formats.
So yes, we *could* build a scheduling provider, but I think we want to
think very hard about what level of scheduling we want to support.
systemd's scheduler is a very large superset of what cron is capable
of, so I suppose we could build that first and then extend it later to
support the advanced systemd features.
Starting with cron would also have the advantage of building the most
portable code first; it would make sense to add the more
version-specific options later.
--Stephen