$Id: README,v 1.4 2004/06/04 22:17:56 hackworth Exp $

$Id: README,v 1.4 2004/06/04 22:17:56 hackworth Exp $

Chronic
A constraints-based, opportunistic scheduler
in the spirit of ``cron''

Introduction

Chronic is a constraints-based, opportunistic, application-level
scheduler. Unlike cron, that schedules according to a time
specification, Chronic schedules tasks when specified constraints are
met. In other words, Chronic schedules during a window of opportunity
when the circumstances are favorable.

The original motivation for Chronic was for me to be able to schedule
high-impact, recurring tasks like updatedb, emerge rsync, webalizer
when I was away from the computer, and my computer mostly idling. This
proved to be useful enough to abstract the notion of a "constraint"
and build an opportunistic scheduler that schedules according to
combinations of arbitrary constraints. The current version of Chronic
natively contains the following constraints: System Inactivity, Disk
I/O & Load Average. Other constraints planned for new future include:
Network IO activity, cron (which emulates cron), and existence of new
files under a directory.

Availability

Chronic is distributed through CPAN (http://cpan.org) and through
SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/chronic/)

The latest development version can be checked out of SourceForge
CVS.

Installation

Chronic is written in Perl and requires a recent version of perl5
interpreter. If you are not running a stone age unix, a perl5
interpreter should already be installed on your system. Otherwise,
you can find one at http://www.cpan.org.

Follow the following instructions to build and install Chronic.

tar zxvf Chronic-v.vv.tar.gz
cd Chronic-v.vv
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
su
make install

``chronicd'' should now be installed on your system.

Usage

See the chronicd manpage, or perlpod docs/chronicd.pod

Author

Vipul Ved Prakash <[email protected]>

License

Chronic is distributed under the Artistic License. See ARTISTIC
for details.