dbus and launchd

[Dan Ports]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 12:12:17AM -0600, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On-demand launching has been requested in some of my ports (see tickets) but I declined, saying it should be handled in base. I haven't used on-demand plists so I don't know about any bugs involved. Are there any downsides to on-demand launching? Should it be an option in macports.conf?

I can't claim any expertise with on-demand launching, although it
sounds like a great feature to me.

I don't know the details of how on-demand was broken in 10.4 other than
that I saw the claim repeatedly in reference to dbus, but launchd
definitely changed substantially in 10.5: in particular, OnDemand
became the more flexible KeepAlive. Which suggests to me that being
compatible with both Tiger and later versions would at least be
non-trivial, though perhaps that's not such an issue anymore.

Besides Rainer's suggestion of launchd.plist(5), another useful
reference is TN2083 "Daemons and Agents":
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2005/tn2083.html
but unfortunately it doesn't seem to have been updated for 10.6.

Dan

-- 
Dan R. K. Ports              MIT CSAIL                http://drkp.net/