Trent Nelson writes:
On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 08:49:52PM -0500, Jesse Noller wrote:
Windows Services != Unix daemons. Admittedly, I haven't had to do it in awhile, but from what I remember, windows services are nowhere near the same type of beast as a unix daemon, and trying to make a unified daemon library that glosses over the differences might cause seizures and habitual smoking.
A unix-only daemon - and then a complimenting windows-only service library - makes sense. Ideally, they would have close to the same API, but I don't think log jamming all of the vagaries of both into one beast makes sense. Then again, my windows-ability is out of date and rusty.
See, I disagree with that as well. Take a look at what Qt did with their QtService class:
Thanks for mentioning that again; I saw another reference to it earlier, but didn't respond.
I'd like to hear arguments for why that QtService interface is perceived as being deficient.
Off the top of my head: The QtService model seems to be “start an additional process and maintain it at arms length, with a bunch of communication channels into and out of it”. Contrariwise, this PEP addresses the use case of “turn the *current* program into a daemon process, so that everything further this program does is running inside that process”. It's too big, as a result of the above difference in focus. When writing a Unix daemon program, I don't want the great majority of what that interface offers. It misses a lot, again as a result of the mismatch in purpose. After setting up a QtService, I need to continue chattering with it to find out what's going on inside it, and to do things like change its state or log a message. The current PEP, on the other hand, doesn't have the model of managing a separate process; the daemon is the *current* program, so one can just do things like output or state changes as one normally would. In short: It addresses a different problem to what I'm addressing with this PEP. -- \ “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all | `\ others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking | _o__) power called an idea” —Thomas Jefferson | Ben Finney