The Shepherd 1.0.0 released

Post by dannyobrien » Tue, Jan 14, 2025, 7:50 PM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #19

"give a man an inch and they'll take a mile" and what not, but, I wonder how hard this would be to port to Hoot, a web assembly/wasm-ified Guile Scheme. https://spritely.institute/hoot/ It would be neat to have some real management APIs for the things running on a page, to be able to manage long running processes & workers. A bit more niche than for general webapps, but systemgo comes to mind; a re-impl of some of sy…

Post by paroneayea » Tue, Jan 14, 2025, 7:59 PM UTC

davexunit wrote: post #16

Shepherd is a wonderful little service manager. The project has been integrating the good features of systemd (socket activation, timers, etc.) while retaining the hackability of using a fully featured programming language for configuration. Been happily using it with Guix for over a decade! NLnet has funded a really cool project to turn Shepherd into a distributed system that enables a fleet of Shepherds to cooperat…

Post by packetlost » Tue, Jan 14, 2025, 8:11 PM UTC

uludag wrote: post #7

danudey wrote: post #2

Taking a quick look at this, the first thing I notice is that the configuration file syntax is obtuse and nigh-illegible unless you already know what things are, and even then it's cumbersome and looks frustrating to write. e.g. instead of systemd's simple: Exec=/path/to/ntpd -n -c /etc/ntpd.conf -u ntpd -g We have this mess: #:start (make-forkexec-constructor (list "…/bin/ntpd" "-n" "-c" "/…/…-ntpd.conf" "-u" "ntpd"…

I think this may be just due to unfamiliarity. Like, if that mess you shared was written as follows: { start: makeForkexecConstructor(["…/bin/ntpd", "-n", "-c", "/…/…-ntpd.conf", "-u", "ntpd", "-g"]), logFile: "/var/log/ntpd.log" } this wouldn't bat an eye. Even though I've never used Guile, just familiarity with Elisp makes that example pretty straightforward. Lisp-adjacent people would all pretty quickly grok this…

Post by Bootvis » Tue, Jan 14, 2025, 8:52 PM UTC

packetlost wrote: post #26

uludag wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this may be just due to unfamiliarity. Like, if that mess you shared was written as follows: { start: makeForkexecConstructor(["…/bin/ntpd", "-n", "-c", "/…/…-ntpd.conf", "-u", "ntpd", "-g"]), logFile: "/var/log/ntpd.log" } this wouldn't bat an eye. Even though I've never used Guile, just familiarity with Elisp makes that example pretty straightforward. Lisp-adjacent people would all pretty quickly grok this…

Eh, I'm a Schemer (not Guile though) but the above is dramatically less readable and, at a glance, understandable than the equivalent systemd .target file. The problem with Lisps (but especially Schemes) is there's magic everywhere that makes no sense without having a sizeable context of the program you're working in.

Post by jauntywundrkind » Tue, Jan 14, 2025, 9:18 PM UTC

dannyobrien wrote: post #22

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #19

"give a man an inch and they'll take a mile" and what not, but, I wonder how hard this would be to port to Hoot, a web assembly/wasm-ified Guile Scheme. https://spritely.institute/hoot/ It would be neat to have some real management APIs for the things running on a page, to be able to manage long running processes & workers. A bit more niche than for general webapps, but systemgo comes to mind; a re-impl of some of sy…

Amusingly enough, the main direction Shepherd is exploring right now is integrating Spritely Goblins (the folks that are also writing Hoot), so that it would have a distributed, capability-based process manager. I wouldn't say running Shepherd with Hoot is a direct goal of this, but it may fall out naturally from it. Shepherd may actually work in Hoot right now -- I know the Spritely team were working on getting Guil…