[tahoe-dev] Have some startup and maintenance facilities

[Brian Warner]

On 3/28/12 6:13 PM, Kevin Reid wrote:

> LaunchDaemon. A LaunchAgent is per GUI-login session, a LaunchDaemon
> is global. This goes in
> /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.tahoe-lafs.tahoe.plist (or other
> appropriate reverse-DNS identifier, with matching Label value):

OMG awesome! Thanks, I've been trying to find out where that should go
and what it should contain for years!

Now what we need is a Mac installer (or an .app that installs this the
first time you run it) to lower the energy barrier of finding this text,
copying it into a file, moving it to the right place, failing, sudo
moving it into the right place, rebooting, nothing happening, not being
able to find the log file that explains why it's failing, changing
ownership/permissions until it works, and rebooting a few more times to
make sure that it keeps working :).

> Don't know what's wrong with cron jobs. crontab -e, add a line, done.
> 
> 30	 2	*	*	*	~/bin/tahoe-repair-all

Mostly, yeah, but:

* overlap/locking: various bugs/errors could cause the repair to stall
  or go really slowly, and if it takes >24h and you get multiple
  overlapping copies then things get weird (and gets worse if it happens
  multiple times)
* if something breaks halfway through, you'll get good repair coverage
  on the first half of the tree, but none on the second half: ideally
  we'd have something to keep track of directories that haven't been
  processed in a while and start with the oldest first, to even out the
  coverage
* it'd be nice to limit the bandwidth of check/repair, to make this
  co-exist peacefully with other network users. That could be done
  inside the client, though.

Plus a subset of the aforementioned energy-barrier issues.

But overall, yes, tools like this would be great to have built-in
somehow.

thanks,
 -Brian