Re: launchd wrong behavior for nonexistent paths and crashed services
Re: launchd wrong behavior for nonexistent paths and crashed services
- Subject: Re: launchd wrong behavior for nonexistent paths and crashed services
- From: Terry Lambert <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 10:01:55 -0700
On Sep 15, 2008, at 9:20 AM, Cristescu Alexandru
<email@hidden> wrote:
Hello all,
launchd tries to restart indefinitely some service in
the following two cases:
1) launchd plist with wrong ProgramArguments key
"
Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
posix_spawnp("<ProgramArguments>", ...): No such file
or directory
"
The problem is very annoying if some other application
waits for this service to start.
I don't see a reasonable failure mode for this case, since if program
B needs service A, it needs service A. You might argue for a cascade
failure, where if service A won't load, B should fail in its attempt
to contact A rather than launchd answering the phone and being unable
to hand off the connection to A.
On the other hand, you could argue that while what it's trying to
launch doesn't currently exist, it will in the future as a result of a
not yet completed operation (a network mount, a disk mount for a disk
currently being fsck'ed, a thumb drive containing your ssh keys being
inserted, or the binary is in fact being generated, etc.).
You could also argue that "the plist needs fixed" and/or "do not
install busted plists in the first place".
Since there's no way to distinguish a transient vs. Permanent failure,
and you presumably intentionally installed it, you intended launchd to
keep trying.
2) a service keeps crashing
CrashReporter never shows even if I have the
CrashReporterPrefs on "Developer" level. It is true
that it says: "Display the Unexpectedly Quit dialog
for all the processes run by the user".
Is this the system launchd, or the per-session launchd? You will only
get the dialog if it's something that's in the current GUI context
(search for "CrashReporter" on <http://developer.apple.com> for more
details).
Mac OS X 10.4 had a limit
(LAUNCHD_FAILED_EXITS_THRESHOLD). What was the reason
to remove it ?
You could as Dave or file a bug. But see above; there are legitimate
reasons for persistently retrying. Probably they outweighed the
likelihood of an actually broken plists remaining installed or
exporting a service legitimately required by some other process and
the system remaining functional.
-- Terry
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