Howdy all,

Many people evidently want a proposal for a “service” interface, and saw part of what they wanted in the separate discussion of the “Standard daemon process library”. As discussed there, a Unix daemon is a quite distinct, yet complementary, concept to a service.

This is a skeleton of a PEP, presented in order that discussion of what people want from a “service” has a concrete focus. The specification is based on work from Trent Nelson.

Note that I'm not intending to propose, implement, or champion this PEP. I present it as is because there is a clear desire to see something like it, and in the hope that those with more enthusiasm for it can take it and improve on it to the point where it gets a champion.

:PEP: XXX :Title: Background process services :Version: 0.1 :Last-Modified: 2009-01-30 16:40 :Author: Ben Finney ben+python@benfinney.id.au :Status: Draft :Type: Standards Track :Content-Type: text/x-rst :Created: 2009-01-30 :Python-Version: 3.1 :Post-History:

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Abstract

This PEP introduces a package to the Python standard library that provides an interface to the task of creating a separate background process, and maintaining an ongoing service channel with that process.

.. contents:: .. Table of Contents: Abstract Specification Interface Service objects Motivation Rationale Reference Implementation References Copyright

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Specification

Interface

A new package, service, is added to the standard library.

The package defines a class, Service, used to set up and maintain the service.

Service objects

A Service instance represents a control channel to a separate, background process that runs concurrently with the existing program. The existing program communicates with that background process via the corresponding Service instance.

__init__(self, func, name, desc=None, startup_type=StartupType.Auto) Initialises the parameters of a new service […]

The `func` argument is a callable, which will be called to run in
the background process when the service is started.

[…]

parse_arguments(args) […]

is_running() Returns True if the background process is currently running […]

is_installed() Returns True if […]

install() […]

uninstall() […]

report_event(self, msg, event_type, id, category, data) […]

exec() […]

terminate() […]

request_pause() […]

request_resume() […]

send_command(code) […]

run(args) […]

start() Start a new background process running the func callable […]

* On Unix, this creates a new daemon process.

* On MacOS, […].

* On MS Windows, […].

stop() Stop the background process […]

pause() […]

resume() […]

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Motivation

[…]

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Rationale

[…]

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Reference Implementation

[…]

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References

[…]

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Copyright

This work is hereby placed in the public domain. To the extent that placing a work in the public domain is not legally possible, the copyright holder hereby grants to all recipients of this work all rights and freedoms that would otherwise be restricted by copyright.

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