[aprssig] netsked

[Alex Carver]

> 
> Hi Alex,
> 
> Thanks for the reply,
> 
> I think you may have misinderstood, the netSked spec says
> "FOr example
> "3/30" indicates it will be transmitted every 3 minutes for
> 30 minutes. " so
> it does give transmit interval as well as a duration - I
> just wanted to
> check if the duration applies to the beacon start time or
> the actual net
> start time.  The file at http://www.aprs.org/info/netsked.txt was written in
> 2008 so I also wanted to check I am looking at the most
> uptodate spec.

You're right, I read it very quickly and missed a few words.

> My comment regarding "Weekday", "Weekend" and "Daily"
> keywords was a only
> suggestion to extend Bobs suggested file format - many Nets
> run daily on
> weekdays or on weekend days only rather than once a week or
> every second
> week.

I understand I just think that file format isn't really suitable which is why I'm suggesting something else entirely.  Dropping some of the fields from that file and leaving them in the cron file would work better.


> Thanks info re Cron.  I'd prefer to write as a daemon
> (initially in PHP as
> it's all I'm comfortable with and then try porting to C or
> even java) so it
> would be more platform independent.

Cron is platform independent.  There are crons for Windows, Mac, Linux and nearly everything else.  The cron file format is consistent across them all.  The script that gets called from cron is the only platform dependent thing but cron iteslf is independent.

C is most certainly not platform independent because libraries are different on each platform.  The only way it becomes platform independent is to use a shim on the non-POSIX platforms that extends POSIX compliant libraries and then code only in POSIX compliant format.  For example, I have some C code I wrote that I can compile on Linux and also on Windows assuming that is is compiled using Cygwin.  If not, I can't compile for Windows.

PHP is only platform independent assuming you have a compiled version of PHP for that platform.  Even then, it's not truly independent because some things such as file paths and dates are not quite the same.  Java has a similar problem (not to mention being horribly bloated).