GSoC 2018 Project: Improve startupitem code

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

> On Feb 15, 2018, at 10:47 AM, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On 2018-2-16 05:04 , Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:
>> 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?
> 
> This is <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/44295>.

Is this one of the issues you are closing?

>> 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.
> 
> I've thought about that. It should be possible to allow not setting
> startupitem.create but rather providing your own plist if you require a
> level of customisation beyond what base allows. That way we don't have
> to add Tcl options for every launchd key under the sun.

And changes Apple may make.

>> The common locations where launchd plists need to be loaded from:
>> ~/Library/LaunchAgents
> 
> Installing into ~ is problematic in general. I don't think it's really
> needed; per-user stuff can live in /Library/LaunchAgents.

Of course, thanks for the point.

So we might have “startupitem.directory /Library/LaunchDaemons”, the default, but can be set to “startupitem.directory /Library/LaunchAgents”?

—
Brad