Should "scheduling" be renamed, questions re-tagged or just the description updated?

Question

Inspiration was this post which was mistakenly tagged scheduling even though the description on the tag page seems to be saying it's for crond and atd scheduled jobs.

However some other people seem to have taken it to mean what I would have assumed it meant: determining the share and order of some sort of operation (Disk I/O, network packet queuing, CPU time, etc).

This seems like an issue with organization. Should the description updated or should these be re-tagged with something else and leave scheduling to mean crond/atd?

Answer 1

I'm not sure splitting process and I/O scheduling is really worth it, as they're often deeply interconnected anyway. (E.g., if a process is waiting on I/O, it can't be scheduled to run). Also, network scheduling is more normally called QoS, rate limiting, or traffic shaping, and is configured differently than disk I/O scheduling, so I wouldn't include it in I/O scheduling. I'd suggest keeping scheduling the refer to process and I/O scheduling, though would not object to splitting that to process-scheduling and either disk-scheduling or io-scheduling.

Job scheduling is, I think, not normally used to refer to cron-style "run this at 01:03 every Sunday"; it's closer to what batch does. Though would often be used across a cluster. So I wouldn't use that.

Task Scheduler is the name of a Windows component. It's also quite close to multitasking, which is what process (and I/O) scheduling does. Further, "task" isn't normal Unix terminology. So I wouldn't suggest that.

The cron manpage describes it as a "daemon to execute scheduled commands". So I'd suggest command-scheduling.