[launchd-dev] Remove "disabled" services; Migrate from "old" launchd

[Jerry Krinock]

> On 2015 Aug 24, at 09:12, Damien Sorresso <dsorresso at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> Disabling [removing] prevents the job from being loaded at all. So if the job exists in that disabled list, launchd will refuse to load it …

That’s good, Damien, but is it OK to have 3000 “disabled” jobs?  Given the size of today’s hard drives, it could be argued that this is merely a cosmetic issue, but since there is apparently no limit or frequency with which agents can be created, one could easily have 10,000, 100,000 or 1,000,000.  Is there no way to “empty the trash”?

> It's a switch in terminology, but not as radical a change as you might fear. A "service" in launchd refers to anything that is a daemon, agent, or XPC service, that is, anything launchd can load and manage. Daemons and agents are still things, as are XPC services. But in the new implementation (introduced in Yosemite), they are all represented by the same data structure and go through the same basic bootstrapping path. In prior implementations, they were treated substantially differently.

That is very good, thank you.

> If any of this was unclear in the documentation or can be made more clear, I encourage you to file bugs. These kinds of concepts are critical to developing a good mental model of how launchd operates, so good documentation is key.

OK, I just spent a half hour reading the documentation and shall file something.


> On 2015 Aug 23, at 18:43, Thomas <tclementdev at free.fr> wrote:
> 
> I don't think you can remove them. You should use the same job label to avoid having these many job entries or posix_spawn from your main agent instead or use an xpc service instead.

I think you are correct, Thomas.  But I’m still looking to confirm that in the documentation!