$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 <mail@vipul.net>

License

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