TaskForest Job Scheduler / News: Recent posts

TaskForest now has two mailing lists: taskforest-announce and taskforest-discuss. The first is for announcements of new releases. The discuss list is for support, bug reports, feature requests, etc.

Please consider subscribing to the taskforest-discuss list and joining it. As the author, I have learned a lot from users, and your comments and questions help drive the development of the product, and help improve it.... read more

Fixed a bug that was causing the rerun and mark commands run with the --cascade or --dependents_only flag to print an error message when there was, in fact, no error, and possibly exit before rerunning or marking all requested jobs.

All of the changes in this release are related to the website.
o Made sure that if a job file dies after the fork but before ceding
control back to the wrapper, you can at least see its log, if it was run
with run_with_log
o The website now shows the log file for running jobs, not just jobs that
have completed.
o Fixed bug where marking a job as Success was not working after it had
been marked as Failure
o Moved mark and rerun forms to buttons on the status and logs tables
o Changed website to a horizontal layout, so that we have the full window
width for tables
o Fixed a bug so that rerun jobs log files are displayed correctly on the
web site.
o Added 'Cache-Control: Public' HTTP response header to allow Firefox 3 to
cache SSL pages which it does not do by default. This greatly improves
website performance if you're using Firefox 3. Firefox 2 does not
support the Cache-Control response header, so the website will be slower
if you're using SSL and Firefox 2 or earlier.
o Added the 'help' and 'about' documentation sections to the website.

The TaskForest web site is now available at http://www.taskforest.com/ . The main purpose of this website is to educate prospective users about the features and capabilities of TaskForest, and to provide online documentation for existing users.

There have been some MAJOR enhancements since version 1.14:

1.15 Sun Feb 15 2009

The ordering of jobs displayed by the status command was changed. The status command now accepts a --date option, to view jobs that ran on a previous date. When run for the current day, the status command now also displays all jobs that ran that are not currently in any Family. This handles the case where the jobs are removed from family files intra-day, after running. These jobs are displayed using the newly-supported default_time_zone option.... read more

A new config option (and command line argument) was added. The ignore_regex option instructs the system to ignore any Family files whose names match the regular expressions specified by this option. It's primarily used to ignore .bak and ~ files left by text editors. Also fixed a bug so that invalid file names are excluded.

This is a minor enhancement release. The behavior of recurring jobs that are scheduled in a foreign time zone was not well defined. Now, the 'start' and 'until' of recurring jobs are always based on the most specific timezone of the job.

A border-condition bug dealing with foreign timezones crossing a date boundary was fixed.

Minor errors in the documentation and logging
were fixed. A test case that was returing
false negatives was made more robust.

TaskForest version 1.10 is now available. The following is the summary of changes:

Syntax error checking was added to the Family
file parser. Optional logging of STDOUT and
STDERR is now possible. The mark and rerun
commands can now act on just the job specified,
or on all its dependents or on both - the job and
its dependents. Finally, a config file can now
be used in lieu of command-line options or
environment variables. ... read more

1) The 'rerun' script makes a job available to be
rerun, regardless of whether or not it ran
successfuly. It does this by renaming the
job's log files from FF.JJ.* to
FF.JJ--Orig_n--.* where n is an integer that
starts at 1 for the first rerun, and is
incremented by one at every rerun.

2) The 'mark' job marks a job as 'Success' or
'Failure', regardless of whether or not it ran
successfully. It does this by renaming the job
rc file from FF.JJ.x to FF.JJ.0 (in the case of
Success) or FF.JJ.1 (in the case of Failure).
If the job's status is already as requested, a
warning is printed, and nothing is done.... read more

Version 1.09 should be out this this weekend (April 27, 2008). New features include:

1) --collapse command line argument to the 'status' command. This 'hides' repeat runs that are in the waiting state. Useful when you have a task scheduled to run every minute.

2) 'chained' option to a repeat job's configuration in a family file. The default behavior of repeat jobs are that they are not dependent on each other. With "chained" set to 1, each repeat job instance will be dependent on the previous one. This way if you start taskforest later than normal, you won't have a bunch of copies of the job running at the same time... read more