From jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU Fri Dec  1 16:48:14 1989
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 89 14:33:27 -0500
From: Joe Harrington <jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: kkkken@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: kkkken@ATHENA.MIT.EDU's message of Fri, 1 Dec 89 00:35:54 -0500 <8912010535.AA00502@FRANK-HERBERT.MIT.EDU>
Subject: appts
Cc: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU

The real key for me and other partly non-athena users is that many of
us are on machines running in a timesharing mode.  The at command has
rarely worked well, and requires resetting the command every time you
want something to run.  (at runs a shell script -- only -- at a
certain time.  once).

I figured that you could use appdaemon to be an improvement over and a
generalization of several current unix utilities:

leave/zleave
at
calendar

and others, most of which are falling into disuse because of Athena's
move to systems without accounts on them.  I guess that having it
notify you of appointments which triggered since the last time you
logged out (or better: the last time an appdaemon running on your file
exited) would be equivalent to having it run all night for the case of
messages, and this kills the idea of a campus server.

Still, if I can get it to run all night on my timesharing system, I've
got something better than at, and it uses the same format as the
system I use for short and long term appointments.  In this case, the
error recovery stuff is still important, though the net stuff isn't.
I'd say that having a centralized daemon would be better than not,
because the system can restart the centralized daemon after a boot,
but it would be harder to have it restart all the daemons that users
were running, unless they somehow registered with a central daemon
anyway.

--jh--