On May 21, 2006, at 9:56 PM, Michael Bartosh wrote:Apple's fascination with booting fast has cause headaches for system administrators in Tiger.
Booting fast was just a nice side affect of a clean architecture. It may have acted as a motivating factor for adoption, but I'll promise you, during our new project proposal reviews, the management hierarchy was very skeptical that performance could be improved. Booting faster was simply not a goal to measured or even talked about. All that was expected was parity. It is unreasonable to expect every software package on earth to adopt some kind of IPC-based dependency mechanism.
Perfect example:
Another example:
We only expect what our customers (including system administrators) expect: Robust, easy to use and flexible software. I also have no doubt that our customers want to see daemons be more resilient to the real world, which will, in the end require the use of IPC.
We realize we're in a transition period, and that is why StartupItems still work. Please consider using them if you have fragile software that makes flawed assumptions ("bugs") about how the world works. Please also consider filing bug reports against daemons that have adopted launchd but apparently haven't worked all the kinks out yet. Thanks. It is telling that most of the more competent people in the Mac Sysadmin community have stated this over and over, while Apple still maintains that the lack of a dependancy checking mechanism is a feature.
It is a feature. Like it or not, we're designing and evolving Mac OS X not for the needs of yesterday, or one specific problem domain, but to last the next 10-20 years and to handle workloads we can't even imagine yet. The old StartupItem view of the universe is inherently fragile, and our customers are simply demanding a more robust computing experience. We're moving on, and we know our third party developers will too.
We're truly sorry that as a system administrator this transition is causing you grief, but in a year or two, we hope that you'll be happier with a more robust computer (especially as a sysadmin).
Cheers,
davez |