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[Hrvoje Niksic]

"Berndl, Klaus" <klaus.berndl at sdm.de> writes:

>>That's perfectly fine with me, many programs do that.  The advantage
>>for us is that we no longer need to exactly reimplement every nuance
>>of FSF's run-at-time, we only need to implement our API correctly.
>
> Correctly and in addition with a layer which offers the most often
> used and most important tasks of the API in form of some few
> easy-and-conveniant-to-use functions. If you mean this with the term
> "correctly" then i fully agree.

I'm not sure I'm getting the point here.  Let me see if I understood
you correctly.

It sounds like you perceive the itimer API as a low-level thing which
is hard to use without a higher abstraction level.  I'm pretty sure
that its author did not intend it as such.  In other words, if you
feel that something is missing from the API, you should by all means
ask for it.  (In fact, you did ask for run-at-time, but that function
requires the whole timer.el API, hence my run-at-interval
counter-suggestion.)  That goes not only for the itimer API, but for
other things, such as extents, keymaps, specifiers, menus, etc.

Did I understand you correctly?

> Oops, sorry, my fault, i have expressed this misunderstanable. What
> i wanted to say is exactly what you have answered. I meant to put
> the *functionality* not the *compatibility* of timer.el into some
> not-fsf-compat-package. So to speak with our example of
> "run-at-interval": Such a function should be added to itimer.el.

We might want to move that proposal to `xemacs-design'.  The
implementation should be simple -- simply take timer.el's run-at-time,
but implement it using itimers directly, and have it return the
itimer.  I'm not sure if Kyle Jones, author of itimer, reads these
lists, so we might want to Cc him for suggestions.

> BTW: I just saw the function start-itimer which is pretty much an
> one-function-easy-to-use-on-top-layer over itimer.el.

Does it mean that start-itimer removes the need for a run-at-time
clone?

> Unfortunatelly there is no info-manually for itimers which points me
> to that function.

Sorry about that.  itimer originated as a third-party package to add
interval timer functionality to XEmacs, and became "official" much
later.  Noone got around to documenting it properly.  Until this is
done, `M-x apropos RET itimer RET' is the most readily available
compendium.