Comment 1 for bug 1050366

I personally find periodic a bit odd as it is not very controllable - you
don't know how often it is going to be called. I prefer the idea of a timer
as you know exactly how it is called and is not at the whim of the admin.

In nova we can define a Manager class that inherits from PeriodicTasks
the question is do other projects want a periodic api or timer api?

Any reason we can't just use the timer_add() method?