site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Sounds like a reasonable position to me. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... 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. 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. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com