svn commit: r200743 - in head/usr.sbin: . service

[Robert Watson]

On Sun, 20 Dec 2009, Brooks Davis wrote:

>>> About the value this change, I think it should be same as the values at 
>>> boot time.  I cannot imagine that someone want to restart the system 
>>> daemons under the user environment.
>>
>> dougb> I can actually, especially for ports.
>>
>> Yup, I often do restart the services installed from ports, too. I meant 
>> that I don't want that the values of user environment are inherited to the 
>> services which is started from the user environment.
>
> This is where the value of service(8) would lie for me.  The ability to not 
> have things work by accident due to my environment and then break at reboot 
> would be be very helful.

There are several other types of context we've historically not properly 
set/restored when managing service state, such as:

- Full user credential context (user IDs, group IDs, etc)
- Additional login class state, such as resource limits and MAC labels
- User audit state

With Apple's launchd, service descriptions can include user credentials that 
will be set before the service is started.  Being able to do that here as well 
would be great, especially in a future where part of our supplemental user 
credential will be additional system privileges.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge