[launchd-dev] 10.4 & 10.5 Launch Agent compatibility

[Quinn]

At 6:37 -0700 18/2/09, Steffan A. Cline wrote:
>Yes, sir. I did try this on my dev box and it works. Seems like a lame
>choice but what other options are there to get a gui app to run without a
>user logged in?

Be aware that LimitLoadToSessionType is a nop on 10.4.x; launchd just 
doesn't look at it at all.

Trying to do GUI from a launchd agent on 10.4.x is just not going to 
work reliably.  Things will limp along for a while, but then 
something will happen (the user will log in or out via the GUI, or 
via SSH) and everything will stop working in mysterious ways.

This is definitely something that Apple does not support.  You'd be 
better off dropping support for this feature on this version of the 
OS, and using your engineering time to do something that's likely to 
yield long-term results.

If you absolutely must do this on 10.4.x you will have to switch to 
the system login item plus global login item approach.  That's also 
not much fun, but it can be made to work reliably.

S+E
-- 
Quinn "The Eskimo!"                    <http://www.apple.com/developer/>
Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware