In message <email@hidden>, Graham J Lee writes:
>I think the argument would be that system startup is just a specific
>example of the general case "something interesting happened and I want
>to be run because of it", and that launchd deals with the happening of
>interesting things. I'd agree with that, if it were the argument :-)
Hmm.
Well, that suggests a way to resolve this fairly elegantly; just provide
a hook in plists for having services Do Something which causes other services
to run.
So, say, you add a tag like
<key>StartupDone</key>
<string>Gzornenplatzen</string>
in some plists, and in others, you have
<key>StartupAfter</key>
<string>Gzornenplatzen</string>
Bam. Nice generic way to put the "something happened and I want to be run"
*IN LAUNCHD WHERE IT BELONGS* rather than having all the applications sit
around inventing new notification methods and writing their own code.
That's the thing; in many cases, it's utterly trivial to explain what ordering
I want. If I have an ordering tool, I need one or two lines of code
somewhere. If I have to do all the arbitration by hand, I can end up doing
callbacks and daemon communications in two or three different protocols at
once.
Which goes against the idea of a unified launcher which hides this complexity.
>As a sysadmin, launchd's allowed me to consolidate a mess of crontabs,
>inetd/xinetd configurations, watchdog configurations[1], StartupItems
>and custom rc.local files into a mess of plists looked at by just two
>tools[2]. Still speaking as a sysadmin I tend to think of programs that
>aren't launchd-ready as being so last century (what with there probably
>being an order of magnitude more Tiger users than any other Unix
>distribution, apart from maybe panther) and in need of some updating.
Some programs can be trivially updated, although in practice, I'd bet that
nearly nothing is completely "launchd-ready" in terms of surviving edge
conditions ("I put /Applications on a USB disk that takes a minute to power
up").
>Of course, my dev hat reminds me how much work that can involve...
Yeah.
-s
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Darwin-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/email@hidden
This email sent to email@hidden
