nosh version 1.9

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

Outback Dingo:
>
> IMHO I think we'd be better off with launchd... but this does show 
> intelligence....
>

A while ago, I lived in a comfortable little world.  Yes, everyone else 
was getting the likes of Solaris SMF, AIX SRC, systemd, upstart, and 
whatnot.  But BSD was alright.  Someone was bound to come along and 
package up launchd.  After all, MacOS is BSD ... right?

Then I did some investigation.

There have been, to my knowledge, three attempts (in 2005, 2008, and 
2013) to give launchd to the general BSD world that have involved more 
than just talk.  All have foundered.  The discomforting truth is that we 
aren't going to get launchd for doing service and system management for 
the very same reasons that we aren't going to get systemd for doing 
service and system management.  systemd is full of Linuxisms.  launchd 
is full of Machisms.  It's simply not a BSD program.  It's a Mach 
program.  (The fact that the initial process program isn't portable is 
obvious in hindsight.  I kicked myself. I've written several initial 
process programs before.  They aren't, and cannot be, limited to 
non-operating-system-specific stuff.)  One attempt to port launchd 
involved stubbing out the Machisms.  There has been a recent attempt to 
port systemd to FreeBSD that is in the same boat: stub out or remove all 
of the operating system specific parts, and one can get a program that 
will compile (with a lot of compiler warnings); but it doesn't function.

The launchd train is never coming.  It's this realization, in addition 
to several other motivating factors, that spurred me to aim high with 
nosh, and actually set that task of converting those rc.d scripts.  Feel 
free to thank the valiant and noble failures of the launchd porters for 
the fact that there's one alternative to BSD init that doesn't put an 
XML parser into the program for process #1.  (-: