Information about KCron

[Gary Meyer]

Nicolas --

I'm the original author of KCron from almost 10 years ago. 

Glad to see your interest. 

1.  AFAIK, nobody has really "owned" the program since I wrote it all those years ago. Various relatively small enhancements have been made by various contributors mostly to keep it up to date with APIs since I wrote it, but nobody's yet given it an overhaul. 

2.  Sounds more contemporary. 

3.  Fine here. 

4.  Sounds good. I originally wrote this thing help keep up with Windows 95!

5.  I think this is the best idea. I think I originally wrote this program to help "dumb down" Linux along the lines of many at the time.  I made it more like the Windows Task Scheduler at the time and in the process hid and lost some of the power of Linux in a poorly-executed attempt to increase usability. I think adoption of this program would have been higher if I had attempted to keep the best of both worlds. I also wonder if a wizard would be useful too and the wizard even show and maybe explain the underlying cron file format as well. 

6. I don't know why here. 

Anyhow, best of luck.

-- Gary
 

-----Original Message-----
From: "Nicolas Ternisien" <nicolas.ternisien at gmail.com>

Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:54:41 
To:"Gary Meyer" <gary at meyer.net>, "Robert Berry" <rjmber at ntlworld.com>, "James Ots" <code at jamesots.com>, "Alberto G. Hierro" <alberto.hierro at kdemail.net>, kde-core-devel at kde.org, kde-release at kde.org
Subject: Information about KCron


Hi all,

My name is Nicolas Ternisien, and I am coordinating the KDE Admin
package of KDE.

I would like to know more about the actual status of KCron.
After a little review of it, it seems to be quite powerful, but some
little things could be improved.

Here is a list of questions and ideas :

1 / Who is the main and actual maintainer of KCron ? If nobody is
motivated, I could take the time to make the modification myself.

2/ Does the Save button is really useful ? I think it should be easier
if the modification are auto-applied, but could be still canceled by
an Undo action (Ctrl+Z)

3/ I think the environment variables and the tasks should be totally
separated in two different list, and the main one could be the tasks
list, of course, because this is the main role of KCron.

4/ You have already work on KCron, so I suppose you already thought
about the manner of displaying the next launching date. I don't know
if it will be hard to use the calendar widget or something like that
to graphically display this info. Don't hesitate to inform me about
ideas who had to implement this.

5/ Finally, I also think that the crontab -e description of start
times should also appear to ensure people who already knows the
crontab syntax.

6/ Does someone knows why the Oxygen team did not create a new icon
for KCron ? Is it only my Alpha release of KUbuntu which forgot it ?
Do you know how to contact them ?

Thanks for reading this mail.

Regards.

Nicolas Ternisien