Importing djb's public domain daemontools?

[Peter Wemm]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Julian Elischer <julian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 1/17/12 9:29 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
>>
>>  I have spent time with djb-ites in other areas. I tend to ignore
>>  their ranker and focus on the technical issues. I've had issues with
>>  pidfiles and such in the past. There are a lot of hacks to get around
>>  those issues, and things mostly work. If there's a good alternative
>>  that can be demonstrated to work and gain us additional
>>  functionality, I'm all for it. I've fought with init() to make it
>>  keep important daemons around should they die. I've worked with other
>>  systems that make it easy to do and miss that on FreeBSD. It is
>>  possible, but not easy. If daemontools makes it easy, we should
>>  evaluate it.
>
>
>
> don't forget other alternatives..
>
> for example we have launchd from apple which is quite a well
> tested entry in the "init" space of solutions.

At the risk of prolonging the discussion..

We use daemontools at work and I find it horrid to work with.  Really horrid.

However, I do miss a real, pluggable services manager/starter/etc.
launchd springs to mind, if only it wasn't .plist based.

Linux seems to be standardizing on systemd (think of launchd except
made to smell like linux software) as a replacement for everything
including init (just like apple replaced init with launchd).

There has got to be something better and less obnoxious than
daemontools.  We don't need another file system abuser like that one.

-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com; KI6FJV
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5
"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete
themselves upon execution." -- Robert Sewell