Re: Some powerd(8) defaults

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Fri, May 06, 2011 at 03:09:19PM -0400, Steven Bellovin wrote:
> As well it should be; not everything cron does should be disabled because
> you're on battery.  An interesting question is what the general solution
> -- one to permit selective disabling of some entries -- should look like.

This is a threefold problem:

 - changes to cron itself when changing PS state (start/stop logging
   or switch log buffering behaviour)
 - changes to the behaviour of scripts/actions invoked; IMHO such
   differences should be encoded in the scripts themself (querying
   current PS state via sysctl)
 - changes on power state transitions - I would love to see new @
   special strings (similar to @reboot): @tzchange (run whenever
   UTC offsets of the local timezone changes, unrelated to this
   discussion), @pschange (run whenever power state changes),
   maybe even something run when cpu frequency settings change.

The latter would, however, partly overlap in functionality with powerd
scripts (only for root's crontab) - but that is not worse than @reboot
overlapping with rc.d.

Martin