Specifying multiple executable arguments using startupitems

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 14, 2020, at 12:18, Steven Smith wrote:

>> If startupitem support in MacPorts base is not sufficient to express what we need, it should be enhanced.
> 
> That’s a good objective. The current startupitems behavior annoyed me until I just learned to copy what others had done to code around it.
> 
> I’d also note that doing a `man launchd.plist` and `man plutil` on each macOS 10.15, 10.14, … suggests that this is also a pretty ambitious objective for a single tcl function.

Yes, supporting the full expressiveness of plists and the full featureset of launchd in MacPorts would be difficult. However, we should cover the commonly used bases. I think what we have now represents what we thought would be needed when launchd was introduced in Tiger. Maybe one or two keys have been added to MacPorts since then but there are probably many more that Apple has added since then that we have not considered.

And if there is a desire for some advanced portfiles to extensively customize those plists, as there apparently is, then maybe we should provide some easier ways for those ports to do that. For example, would could add something like a post-startupitems proc that ports could define for code they need to run after the plists have been created, and we could provide an easy to use Tcl wrapper around (or reimplementation of) plutil and/or PlistBuddy.