Background jobs

This changeset introduces an abstraction for (maintenance) jobs running in the background, of which execution may be triggered from other threads. SubscriptionManager could very well use this, but I haven't made it do so yet.

~~@xor-freenet Unit tests are not complete, I'll be finishing those tomorrow. I'm filing this pull request early so you can have a look at it already.~~
ACK upon the file except for the above comments.