PEP 3143: Standard daemon process library (was: Writing a well-behaved daemon)

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

On Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:58:58 +1100, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
>Ben Finney <ben at benfinney.id.au> writes:
>
>> Writing a Python program to become a Unix daemon is relatively
>> well-documented: there's a recipe for detaching the process and
>> running in its own process group. However, there's much more to a
>> Unix daemon than simply detaching.
>[…]
>
>> My searches for such functionality haven't borne much fruit though.
>> Apart from scattered recipes, none of which cover all the essentials
>> (let alone the optional features) of 'daemon', I can't find anything
>> that could be relied upon. This is surprising, since I'd expect this
>> in Python's standard library.
>
>I've submitted PEP 3143 <URL:http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3143/>
>to meet this need, and have re-worked an existing library into a new
>‘python-daemon’ <URL:http://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-daemon/>
>library, the reference implementation.
>
>Now I need wider testing and scrutiny of the implementation and
>specification.

The biggest shortcoming seems to be a complete lack of unit tests.  A
quick skim of the code suggests that part of it don't even work at all
and have never been tested, even interactively, since they must surely
fail.  For example, uid/gid setting is broken.

I'd recommend adding an automated test suite, fixing all the issues that
come up during that process, and then asking for scrutiny again.

Jean-Paul