On Sun, 2004-06-20 at 15:19 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote: > Hi there, > > We are building an application to ease the maintenance of the system > schedule. We have crontab-support working and are building support for > at at this moment. > > We have of course a dialog box to add a new scheduled task. The dialog > box of course has a GtkEntry in which the user can type the command that > will be run per frequency setting. > > Our question is whether or not it's a good idea to make this GtkEntry a > GtkComboBoxEntry and let the user choose some predefined commands like > > "A virusscanner" > "Sound an alarm" > "Start a diskcheck" > > Since this would be very distribution specific we (in case this is a > good idea) are planning to put the templates in gconf so that the > packagers and distributions can put those templates, bound to the > distribution, there. If that template even has an icon set, we are > planning to show that icon. > > So a diskscan template would probably be defined like .. in gconf: > > Combostring: Run a diskcheck > Command: sudo fsck -a > ~/.fsck.output; gedit ~/.fsck.output > Icon: /usr/share/pixmaps/diskcheck.png > > And a alarm template could perhaps even propose a frequency setting: > > Proposed frequency: 0 8 * * 1-5 > Combostring: Sound an alarm > Command: play /usr/share/sounds/alarm_song.wav > Icon: /usr/share/pixmaps/alarm.png > > Or primary target for gnome-schedule is to create an interface that > eases to maintenance of the system-schedule to a level that every sane > desktop user can maintain it. Note that gnome-schedule also translates > the frequency to a human readable format (although there are still some > issues for the translators to support this in their own language). This is not very usability related... gconf does not really sound like a good place into which to put that kind information, specially if you are planning on allowing full scripts in the command field, as your diskcheck example suggests Why not set up a $sysconfdir/gnome-schedule directory and put files there, one per option, which are actual shell scripts, which (this is me brainstorming...) when passed the string 'run' as argument will, well, run, and when passed the string 'info' emit a (text/xml/pick-your- format) description of the task, including your Combostring, the icon, the proposed frequency and maybe a full text explanation of what the script does. From what I understand, your app will just edit the crontab, so it could get all this information from the scripts in $sysconfdir/gnome-shell upon initialization (and maybe fam-watch the directory for additions, but that sounds a bit too much) You could even look in ~/.gnome2/gnome-shell/ for extra user defined scripts, but this is doubtful, since the script cannot be arbitrary (unless in the case of user scripts you forget about the metadata and show paths, and stock information instead of proposed frequency, icon, etc) Note this would make it almost trivial for distros to add functionality. Cheers, -- m -- Mariano Suáez-Alvarez <msuarezalvarez arnet com ar>
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