Illumos/OpenSolaris SMF to FreeBSD

[Jordan Hubbard]

> On Jun 11, 2016, at 2:15 PM, Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at komquats.com> wrote:
> 
> Having said all that, I don't think that Apple's launchd was meant for 
> servers or the enterprise, not to mention they closed-sourced it. We 
> probably have to write our own.

Neither of those things are entirely true, however.

1. launchd is agnostic as to workload - there’s nothing particularly “consumer-centric” about its actual design and it works perfectly well in OS X Server, though of course terms like “Server” and “Enterprise” are also broad enough that you can find both pro and con cases to support either argument so I don’t know that it even makes sense to go there.

2. While it is true that the most recent versions of launchd (in Mavericks / Yosemite) have not yet been released, you can start with earlier versions and some might even argue that it makes more sense to do so, as launchd has become somewhat more Apple-centric over time.  We had no problems porting the earlier versions of it to NextBSD, however, and it’s running there just fine.  It also has an Apache license, just to circle back to the license question.

There are other reasons that one may or may not wish to use launchd as a service management framework, and I’m certainly not going to resurrect the old arguments with Mark H. over that (been there, done that, no point in reprising them), but neither of those two would make the top-ten list.

- Jordan