Rather discussing general programming questions in bugs where the discussion results evaporate once the item gets closed, I think it makes more sense to discuss them here in the developer list.
In the past weeks/months P.O. has started and has been doing an immensive amount of work in learning everything that is necessary to create a Mac installer and in addition has started to learn and exploit the ooRexx testing framework. In doing so he has seen problems with rxapi on MacOSX which are linked to the daemon management on Darwin (e.g. *[bugs:#1575] <https://sourceforge.net/p/oorexx/bugs/1575/> * or *[bugs:#1576] <https://sourceforge.net/p/oorexx/bugs/1576/>*). The ooRexx installation as part of the current installation package of BSF4ooRexx for Mac uses knowledge from the community, namely from Bruce Skelly ("CVBruce", an ooRexx committer since 2010-04-12). Bruce created a Mac installer for ooRexx V4 in 2009 (cf "[Oorexx-devel] ooRexx V4 installer for Mac", September 29, 2009 and later). Already back then he had explained how a daemon - and as such rxapid - on the MacOSX must behave, seeing problems there on the Mac. On 2010-02-27, subject "[Oorexx-devel] rxapi on Mac OS X" he also supplied a property list ("plist") file named "org.rexxla.oorexx.rxapid.plist" and reports about his experiences. The plist file he attached to that message is the one, if not mistaken, that I copied into the BSF4ooRexx installer. "rxapid" on Mac popped up again in Bruce's posting of 2010-09-27 ("Oorexx-devel] Mac OS X & rxapid"), also in the "[Oorexx-devel] rxapi Discussion" thread in December 2010. The posting "Re: [Oorexx-devel] (Experimental) MacOSX versions of ooRexx in 32- and 64-bit, where ?" on December 24th, 2010 included the launchctl commands that I incorporated into the BSF4ooRexx postflight and preflight installation scripts. Bruce pointed at problems that include rxapi on Mac, cf. "Re: [Oorexx-devel] Postflight.in, Preflight.in (Re: Observations, request for hints ... (Re: MacOSX: request for hints (Makefile target name to create an archive for the binary?)" on 2011-02-09. Then on 2011-02-20, "Re: [Oorexx-devel] MacOSX: launchd eternally trying respawning the rxapi daemon every 10 seconds ?", the scoop of the rxapi problem on Mac and the present state was given as: "This is a known problem. I've brought it up before. The problem is that Mac OS X daemons that are controlled by launchd, are not allowed to daemonize themselves. Since the current rxapi daemonizes a child process, and then exits, launchd looses all communication/control of the child process. Launchd thinks that the daemon has failed and tries to restart it, which then fails because of the PID file. I coded up a work around similar to the work around that was put in place for AIX. I was told not to mess with rxapi, that someone would rewrite it later.". No one to my knowledge has rewritten it in the past seven-and-a-half years to fix this and unfortunately Bruce's work around has not been incorporated into the Mac version of rxapi back then. On the same thread on 2011-02-11 Bruce in response to David Ashley wrote: "Wouldn't we also be looking at, at least three different versions? AIX uses SRC to control system services, Mac OS X uses launchd, while Linux uses init/inetd." As to this day rxapi related rfes/problems have not been tackled, my suggestion would be to prepare immediately a release of ooRexx 5.1 shortly after 5.0 got released that resolves all known rxapi-related rfes/problems on all platforms, in the process allowing then to have ooRexx also running stably from a stick (i.e. without forcing admin rights). Given all the expertise the ooRexx project possesses, this should be feasible and would be quite helpful for finally allowing ooRexx to be applied and shown off from a stick, which would help tremendously to get it installed with non-superusers, but also to spread the word about ooRexx and show off its capabilities in totally new environments! --- Now turning to Apple's current Darwin, here is a maybe interesting write-up on daemons from Apple's developer site: <https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Chapters/CreatingLaunchdJobs.html> Knowing that we have so excellent Mac knowledged programmers and at least one Mac-savvy committer, it should be possible to tackle rxapi on Mac successfully! For the time being using Bruce's plist and launchctl commands should suffice for ooRexx on Mac to run, even though the rxapid constantly gets restarted at this time. ---rony
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