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Re: StartupItems
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Re: StartupItems


  • Subject: Re: StartupItems
  • From: Kevin Van Vechten <email@hidden>
  • Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 18:47:54 -0700

Andre, I think you're right on the mark, conceptually... however I think it's really more sample code that's necessary, not a GUI utility. (There's already a GUI utility you might want to check out <http://lingon.sourceforge.net/>).

Sample code that can perform the tasks in question, such as "wait until the network interfaces seem to be up" and "wait until the disks seem to have mounted," would probably go a long way toward facilitating the adoption of launchd. (It's really not that much code to accomplish these tasks).

Michael's correct that sysadmins should not need to worry about this. I think the burden is on Apple to provide the necessary information, and on developers (commercial or open source) to adopt the technology. Will it happen overnight? Certainly not. You can see that not even all of Apple's StartupItems were converted to launchd plists for Tiger. But launchd is the direction things are moving, and I think the benefits will become more apparent as we draw nearer the destination.

Also, for what it's worth, there's a WWDC 2006 session scheduled: "Daemon Wrangling with Launchd."

- Kevin

On May 22, 2006, at 6:15 PM, André-John Mas wrote:

Probably a suitable compromise would be come up with GUI based utility that facilitates the creation of launchd based services. I am not sure what sort of form it would take on, but sometimes the best alternative is provide a suitable tool that facilitates the use of the technology at hand.

Andre

On 22-May-06, at 18:00 , Michael Bartosh wrote:


On May 22, 2006, at 10:40 PM, Kevin Van Vechten wrote:

I'd be surprised if there is not a platform specific line of code in your program. You can wrap your launchd support in #ifdef __LAUNCHD__ or something equivalent. It's overstating the problem to say that you can't have a unified code base. Adding Launchd support is a relatively small amount of code, I know from experience. I think your sysadmins (customers) will ultimately be pleasantly surprised by this investment. Your server can be automatically kept alive. This and other servers can be uniformly launched, stopped, and queried via launchctl or programmatically.

That's fine. But what about the poor, dumb sysadmin who -can't write code-. These guys are not developers. Most sysadmins aren't. They take code developed by other people and deploy it themselves. And they need consistent ordering and dependencies that they can impose on that code.


You (Kevin) seem to acknowledge this when someone brings it up. But the messaging from Apple seems to be 'use launchd, it's the wave of the future!'

not

'You might want to use launchd eventually, it has some cool features, but will create headaches for you in the short run'.

When the latter is far more accurate.

You're right. Launchd is cool. It does some very cool things. 90% of the time those things are not accessible without dependency checking various systems require.

I mean, at least add something to launchd.plist that can talk to configd.. wait for specific configd states, like configd's kicker does. That alone would make launchd -a lot- more useful.

-mb
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References: 
 >Re: StartupItems (From: email@hidden (Peter Seebach))
 >Re: StartupItems (From: Kevin Van Vechten <email@hidden>)
 >Re: StartupItems (From: Michael Bartosh <email@hidden>)
 >Re: StartupItems (From: AndrĂ©-John Mas <email@hidden>)

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