GSoC 2018 Project: Improve startupitem code

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

I don’t know that I have a great idea of how to improve startupitems functionality.

I know that over time I have found a few issues. Take the clamav port for example. I needs two launchd plists, one for clamd which is daemon and another for freshclam which updates the antivirus database.

How to handle two launchd plists with “port load” command? Separate ports?

And freshclam is not a service and only needs to run once a day (StartInterval). Currently I have plists in the files directory copy them to distroot.

I think the current system largely works but if there was a way to register launchd plists so “port load clam-server” would load one of more plists multiple locations that might be a nice way to make the “port load” command work in most all cases.

The common locations where launchd plists need to be loaded from:
~/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchDaemons

Josh, worth considering?


Regards,
Bradley Giesbrecht (pixilla)

> On Feb 14, 2018, at 10:29 PM, Umesh Singla <umeshksingla at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> Brad, any thoughts on this? We already have a student interested in this project.
> 
> And thanks for informing, Josh.
> 
> On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 8:15 PM, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:
> On 2018-2-14 22:11 , Umesh Singla wrote:
> > For any discussions on this project, we can follow this thread. I am
> > cc'ing dev list if anyone has any question or idea or extension to it. 
> >
> >     > The first thing I would like you to do is to go through our current list of projects on Trac [0].
> >     >
> >     > Try adding/updating the descriptions for your projects or let me know. Remove anything which is outdated. As you probably know, you can also propose a new idea.
> >     >
> >     > Also, is there any project which you would like me to move up on the list? Currently, there are two projects on the list, "Improve startupitem code" and "Generating Portfiles" listing you as a potential mentor.
> >
> >
> >     I’d love to see the startup item code more closely mirror the
> >     capabilities of launchd :)
> >
> >     It would be able great to write some short hand in a portfile that
> >     builds an xml launchd plist.
> >
> >
> > That's good to know. I've moved this project up the list.
> 
> Just a heads-up, I have been reviewing all the tickets about
> startupitems recently (after having ideas percolate for a long time) and
> have just started committing code. I may close most or all of the
> existing tickets in the not too distant future.
> 
> No doubt there is still more that could be done; just be aware this work
> is happening when planning any potential GSoC project.
> 
> - Josh
>