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Does launchd Beat cron?

Posted by timothy on from the borrowable dept.

Blamemyparents writes "For those who aren't Appleheads, you may not have heard that with Tiger, Apple swapped out old Unix standby cron for their own creation, launchd (Apple mentions it on their OS X page and has the man page for it up as well). Seems like it's a bit nerdy, but this changes a LOT about how *nix systems have done things for many years. Launchd is Apple's replacement for quite a few utilities, including launching and quitting quite a few different things, and getting info from the system and other running processes. This page from Ars Technica talks a bit more in depth about it. Apple has open sourced the thing, and is apparently hoping all the unix kids will take a look."

7 of 798 comments (clear)

  1. Meh. by percussor · · Score: 0, Troll

    Looks like one more PITA for porters...

  2. No thanks. by Some+Random+Username · · Score: 1, Troll

    Adding XML to to core services like init is beyond stupid, and merging several independant utilities into one monolithic tool is the exact opposite of how unix works. A single, simple tool to do a single simple task. I can't imagine why any other unix system would want this thing.

  3. Re:KHTML - Apple again by justsomebody · · Score: 0, Troll

    Some people leave in their own dreams. Trouble is that you can't wake them up.

    And yes, in their dreams Apple is the greatest contributor to OSS

    --
    Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
  4. Re:Ahh yes. by cortana · · Score: 0, Troll

    Plain text eh?

    What endianess is your system? How many bits in a byte? Are you talking EBCDIC, or ASCII? What do you use the 8th bit for, ANSI? A variant of ISO-8859? Windows-1252? Mac Roman? Or something more exotic like KIO8-r, EUC-JP or Shift_JIS? Or do you mean Unicode, in which case do you mean UCS 32 or 16? Or UTF-8 or UTF-7?

    In future, I suggest you read at least the first section of http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/, seven times, before you go mouthing off about issues you don't understand .

  5. "Open Source" or Trojan horse? by sirReal.83. · · Score: 0, Troll
    I really wish Apple would fix their "open source" license, so then I could actually praise them for contributing (and maybe start caring about launchd). Read this snippet of APSL-2:
    12.1 Termination. This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate:

    ...

    (c) automatically without notice from Apple if You, at any time during the term of this License, commence an action for patent infringement against Apple; provided that Apple did not first commence an action for patent infringement against You in that instance.
    That's right, any patent-related lawsuit against Apple voids the license. There are other issues, like the "Tentacles of Evil" clause. Despite what OSI and the FSF says, this license is nonfree. Relevant discussion
  6. Re:Submitter is confused - Mod parent offtopic. by Chucker23N · · Score: 0, Troll

    BSD people? Sun? IBM? Anyone else who doesn't believe in software communism?

  7. Re:Submitter is confused by SA+Stevens · · Score: 1, Troll

    Yet another reason Apple is wrong in claiming 'a UNIX core' to their OS.

    There is seldom, if ever, a 'single right way' to accomplish a task. The Unix philosophy is for there to be many valid and well-characterized ways.

    This just demonstrates how wildly Apple differs from the classic Unix philosophy.