From: Paul Lutus <nospam@...>
Date: 2006-09-10T05:05:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Timer Task?

Jason Vinson wrote:

> The main reason for maintaining a Thread is because there's a tiny bit of
> state involved (I only want to report new mail, not the same new mail over
> and over again).  I'm open to other alternatives, but writing out to the
> file system seems like the only other option, which I'd prefer not to do.

First, there's something misconfigured about your newsreader. Look at my
earlier post, and your reply (to which I am replying). You will see that my
text isn't "quoted" in your reply, but it appears as though it is the new
content.

Second, writing to a file in /tmp could be a reasonable way to get the state
you need. You could purge the file on each reboot. Nevertheless, I see your
point about statefulness.

Another way to do this is to have state information in the user's home
directory (I meant to suggest the user-level cron facility, not the root
cron), under the name of the application, that can be updated without
requiring systemwide resources.

It's a tradeoff worth thinking about, because a continuous, sleeping Ruby
app requires a Ruby interpreter to provide for it, whereas a Ruby app
executed by cron only requires transient resources.

-- 
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com