Building whenever

whenever is being thoroughly tested on Windows and Linux. It should work on Mac too, although I have no possibility to test it personally. On Windows, the build process is seamless as long as Rust and all its dependencies are installed.

The resulting binaries are generally autosufficient on the destination platform: no extra libraries, other than the ones provided by the OS itself, are needed to run it from the command line. Copying the executable file to a directory in the PATH or just invoking it using the full path to the file should be enough to have it up and running.

Building from Scratch

In order to build whenever a recent version of Rust is needed: some of the features that have been released with version 1.87.0 have been used. Once the Rust requirement, along with the toolchain for the destination platform, is fulfilled, the following build commands produce the binaries that are normally available in the published releases:

  1. on Linux:

cargo build --release --no-default-features --features dbus

  1. on Windows:

cargo build --release --no-default-features --features wmi

This way, the produced binaries will only contain code for features that can be effectively used on the host platform.

Build Issues

On Linux, the build process might complain that some packages are missing: it mainly occurs because the “essential build tools” and the development versions of some packages are not installed by default. Taking Debian as an example, the following packages must be installed:

  • pkg-config

  • libx11-dev

  • libdbus-1-dev

  • libxss-dev

  • xscreensaver (not always necessary).

With these packages installed, the scheduler compiles without errors. However, since not all Linux distributions come with Xscreensaver support (which is used to determine idle time), the related condition might not be checked and never fire. There is a DBus based workaround, that allows to use idle session conditions on Linux: the idle time, in this case, is counted as the amount of seconds after the screen has been locked. To enable this workaround, just edit the Cargo.toml file by uncommenting the second of the following lines:

# user-idle has a problem on wayland-based sessions: work around by using
user-idle = { version = "0.5.3", default-features = false, features = ["dbus"] }  # <-- this line must be uncommented
# user-idle = "0.5.3"                                                             # <-- this line must be commented

and commenting the line below.