Importing djb's public domain daemontools?

[Jos Backus]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:00 AM, Diane Bruce <db at db.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:29:53AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> >
> ...
> >
> > I have spent time with djb-ites in other areas.  I tend to ignore their
> rancor 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.
>
> It would be more useful to see what is offered with other systems and see
> if we can provide the same or similar functionality with some sort of
> 'standard' (I know impossible). How much work would it be to simply
> add a few scripts as Doug suggests? etc. etc. Instead of just saying
> "lets import everything in daemontools", what really is proposed?
> How would it impact an embedded system? Is it yet more bloat that should
> be delegated to the same pile of important ports as sendmail, bind etc.
> that
> some of us have been trying to get out of base?
>

I'm proposing that we add some sort of service management framework (big
words, I know) to FreeBSD, as it seems to be the missing part between the
OS and the services running on the OS such as Apache. The only solution
that can handle automatic service restarts without some form of polling is
init, but it is not flexible enough. I am proposing to add daemontools
(specifically, daemontools-encore) because it could be added without
affecting anything else in the base so it would be an easy import: don't
use it if you don't want to. daemontools has not undergone many changes in
recent years so if we were to import it it would likely not change much
thereafter, requiring little maintenance.

That said, if we feel that importing launchd is the better way to go, I'm
all for it. I just want us to add something to fill the gap.

Jos

>
> - Diane
> --
> - db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db
>  Why leave money to our children if we don't leave them the Earth?
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-- 
Jos Backus
jos at catnook.com