Woodchuck is a scheduler for the transmission of delay-tolerant data, such as RSS feeds, email and software updates. Woodchuck improves battery use, reduces cellular network use and hides spotty network coverage by scheduling data transfers when conditions are good, e.g., when attached to power and WiFi is available.

There are currently a few Woodchuck-enabled applications:

- FeedingIt: An RSS reader.
- Khweeteur: A Twitter / identi.ca client.
- APT Woodchuck: Manages software updates

Packages for gPodder will be available soon.

Neal, post here the links to extras-testing voting.

Wait, so it downloads content automatically?
I've never understood what Woodchuck is.

If you install the above software, you will use my personal software repositories.

The Woodchuck software is currently in extras-testing. I'd appreciate it if people would test it so that it can migrate to extras:

• http://maemo.org/packages/package_in....4~20111102-7/
• http://maemo.org/packages/package_in....4~20111102-7/
• http://maemo.org/packages/package_in....4~20111102-7/

how can I personalize APT Woodchuck?

Woodchuck-enabled applications register feeds and objects with Woodchuck (a daemon). When conditions are good, e.g., you are not interacting with the device, there is WiFi and you have battery power (the ideal case), Woodchuck checks what needs to be transferred, starts the corresponding applications and tells them what streams to update and what objects to download.

FeedingIt, an RSS reader, registers each of your RSS subscriptions with Woodchuck and tells Woodchuck that the streams should be updated approximately every 6 hours. Woodchuck starts FeedingIt and tells it to update its feeds when they are not sufficiently up to date and there is good connectivity.

(Currently, Woodchuck never uses your cellular connectivity. Future versions will, after obtaining the user's consent.)

Does that help clarify things?

How would you like to personalize it? Currently, it aims to run the equivalent of apt-get update once a day and prefetch any packages for which updates are available.

well, I wuould like it to do the update for example between 23:00 and 6:00

In that case, you'll want to use something like cron.

Woodchuck doesn't care about the particular time that something occurs; Woodchuck cares about the conditions in which it occurs. So, if you happen to plug in your phone and have WiFi at noon, it may trigger an update when the phone becomes idle. That's better, I think, than updating over cellular at 23:00, because you happen to be at the bar instead of at home, as you usually are.

ok, now I know more