rsyncd with macports 2.5.4 on macOS 10.13.6

[Richard L. Hamilton]

Took me a moment to realize you were referring to the Portfile facility, not the obsoleted (as of what OS version?) OS facility, regarding StartupItems.

Still, I see the plist file you describe is notably simpler than something that the Portfile startupitems facility would have generated (i.e. the one MacPorts installed); no daemondo, no wrapper script.

AFAIK, launchd was introduced with OSX Tiger (10.4); does MacPorts still support anything older than that?  If not, then why not supply launchd plists directly when their functionality would be sufficient?  And couldn't that be done (when sufficient) directly rather than using the Portfile startupitem functionality?


> On Oct 25, 2018, at 13:52, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Oct 25, 2018, at 10:08, Kevin Layer wrote:
> 
>> Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
>> 
>>>> I've had issues before with the whole daemondo wrapper bit.  Some
>>>> things may need it, given how launchd has different expectations
>>>> from other system's approaches to starting daemons, and some
>>>> daemons may not have a sufficiently compliant behavior without
>>>> daemondo as an intermediary.  But when it's not actually needed,
>>>> it's one more thing to go wrong.  In the case of rsync as a daemon,
>>>> it should be possible to write a LaunchDaemon plist file suitable
>>>> for daemons that could be launched by inetd (on other systems) in
>>>> nowait mode.
>> 
>> Is this a problem on the macports side that needs to be addressed, or
>> do I need to do this myself?
> 
> Ports that want to provide launchd plists generally are advised to do so using the startupitem options. These options were designed before the existence of launchd and don't provide a way to handle all of launchd's functionality. There is no support in MacPorts for daemons to be loaded on demand. I guess the ticket tracking the need to expose more of launchd's functionality in portfiles is: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/13807
> 
>> If the latter, any pointers?
> 
> Here's what I use on the private MacPorts rsync server:
> 
> https://github.com/ryandesign/macports-infrastructure/blob/master/ports/sysutils/net.macports.rsyncd/files/net.macports.rsyncd.plist.in
> 
> 
>