Re: StartupItems
Re: StartupItems
- Subject: Re: StartupItems
- From: Garance A Drosihn <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 23 May 2006 22:14:56 -0400
At 10:45 PM -1000 5/22/06, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
Launchd is but one arrow in this quiver, as are the various
notification mechanisms (notify(3), configd, et al) which provide
ways of finding out when things like "disk availability" have
occurred WITHOUT "constantly checking" (to use your suggestion) in a
performance-impacting way. I'm also sure that none of these
mechanisms are close to perfect or all-encompassing, which is why we
need people to file radars asking for enhancements.
Sounds like a reasonable position to me.
You're also on darwin-dev, a list which is specifically dedicated to
dealing with MacOSX-related issues. We're interested in "general
UNIX problems", to be sure, but a solution which only works on
MacOSX is still a solution. If other UNIXen are interested in
solving some or all of the sorts of problems I've talked about then
we'll be more than happy to investigate their solutions as well, but
please don't suggest that we're all constrained to run only as fast
as the slowest runner. That's merely an argument for mediocrity and
maintaining a status-quo which frankly sucks. It's 2006 already -
enough with the clinging to 80's technologies and approaches which
could not possibly have anticipated the world we have today.
Back in the early 1990's I had a NeXTstation. I needed it to work
with DHCP. At the time, many experienced Unix systems-programmers
and sys-admins told me what an ignorant slob I was, and that "unix
HAD to have a fixed-ip address. It just WASN'T possible to reliably
setup unix with DHCP", and that I was a fool for even trying.
After awhile I gave up on the "experienced" wizards who knew all and
did nothing, and I figured out how to get my NeXTstation to do DHCP.
And it worked fine, although admittedly it took me a few weeks to
find everything which wasn't expecting the IP address to change, and
figure out a solution for all of them. But in the end it took me
less time to do it myself, than the time I had wasted trying to
convince these experienced wizards that I needed to have it work. I
had working DHCP, and I didn't have to reboot the machine every time
the address changed.
Hopefully all those experienced wizards are still demanding static IP
addresses for their laptops. Sometimes experience is the worst enemy
of progress.
My guess is that if launchd is improved to cover the issues that it
does not already cover, then five years from now the experienced
wizards will be just as happy with the result as anyone else.
And yes, I run freebsd, and we already have NetBSD's rc.d. That was
a vast improvement over what we had before then, but there's nothing
written in stone saying there can not possibly be an even better way
to do things. It seems to me that it's worth a try.
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = email@hidden
Senior Systems Programmer or email@hidden
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or email@hidden
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