daemondo defeats purpose of launchd?

[Chris Pickel]

On 01 Sep, 2007, at 4:35, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> I have this problem: the lighttpd web server on my MacBook Pro  
> unexpectedly dies rather frequently (much more frequently than it  
> did on my PowerBook). When this happens, the daemondo process is  
> still there, and I have to use launchctl to unload and then load  
> the lighttpd plist to get the server running again.
>
> The point of launchd is that it notices when processes unexpectedly  
> quit, and restarts them automatically so close to no downtime is  
> observed. But launchd is monitoring daemondo, which does not exit,  
> so launchd does not restart anything. And daemondo doesn't seem to  
> have the same process-death-noticing feature so daemondo is not  
> automatically restarting the failed lighttpd.

Agreed. I try to avoid daemondo when possible. When it isn't  
possible, daemondo is an indispensable tool, but it turns out that  
for most cases, it's possible to avoid it. I've written many launchd  
scripts on my own, several of which I've put online [1].

It's possible to make launchd scripts similar to these in MacPorts  
via startupitem.executable, but currently, the startupitem.* commands  
in MacPorts do not support setting the "User" key. For lighttpd,  
that's not necessary; it starts as root so it can listen on the  
privileged port 80, then drops privileges. For mysql, though, it's  
pretty important.

There's also no support for inetd, which I use for rsyncd and cups- 
lpd--but these are not things I expect MacPorts to install scripts  
for anyway.


Chris

[1] http://xml.sfiera.net/
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