site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com On Jun 2, 2006, at 12:18 AM, Peter Bierman wrote: -mb _______________________________________________ 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... You are mischaracterizing our response. Launchd does indeed provide the hooks needed to create static dependency ordering based on strings. For example, you could configure items to trigger off files in /var/run. But none of Apple's "startup items" plan to publish any such strings. You're free to use that mechanism for your own things; it's just not adequate for the stuff the system ships with. System services will publish their "provides" tokens as actual IPC channels instead of strings representing those channels. What mystifies me is why you can't see that launchd is capable of doing what you're asking for, even though we don't choose to use it that way. Keying off pid files is a lot more delicate than the 'requires' and 'provides' keys we had in Startup Items. The former is leaving it mostly in the hands of a daemon. The latter is imposing a dependency. Daemons are not smart enough to handle this themselves. Some don't clear dirty pid files, for instance. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com