SHED

An init and service manager for user services

what?

Session services, programs that run as part of your graphical session, for example in x11 you have the compositor, keyring, maybe a clipboard daemon and perhaps pulseaudio or pipewire

dependencies

• a posix compatible shell interpreter
• core unix utilities (date, mkdir, awk, kill, mkfifo, cat)
• inotifywait from the inotify-tools package (i know freebsd got the program but not what to use in other unices) no longer needed, now a named pipe is used.

why ?

Some programs have the tendency to missbehave when started in a session process in non systemd distros, the prime example right now being pipewire which has spawned this pipewire #1099 and this pipewire #1135 as the issue comments say, this problem forced gentoo to write a wrapper and slackware to roll out a custom daemon program written in C, in my opinion both of these solutions are less than ideal, on gentoo's case they now have to roll out similar wrappers for other missbehaving programs, the slackware program looks unnecessarily overengineered as it still needs more programs to be started correctly.

And the elephant in the room, both these solutions come out as inferior to the likes of systemd units and runit user services as they don't support restarting for reloading configurations nor a correct way for them to be started and stopped by the user.

That is why i came up with this solution that takes a lot of inspiration from the sysvinit architecture with the aim of keeping simple, intuitive and completely agnostic from any window manager and desktop environment, potentially even agnostic to any graphical environment (altho i personally only care or x11)

TODO:

• rewrite readme
• move the details of how shed works to another .md file
• add check if the service is running in start, kill and hup
• add service status action to shedc
• add service restart action to shedc
• add a shed daemon reply socket, so that shedc can wait that shed is reloaded.
• make shedc tail and read the reply socket
• add support for oneshot type services that only run and then exit
• add a session cathegory of services that are not affected by actions (start, stop, restart) sent to all nor by reloads of shed, so that stuff like window managers can be managed on this cathegory
• implement the XDG_AUTOSTART spec and provide the option to start and manage services from the autostart as regular ones.
• write bash completion scripts
• write zsh completion scripts
• draw a logo/icon for shed to use in the repo

DO NOT USE THE GIT MASTER EVER!

Ehhhh not really but the git master is not stable and may break without notice, in which case specify you used the master branch and not a release tag, i tend to use changes that have not yet been merged to master first cuz i develop this for myself as target audience second cuz it will break on my machine first before breaking on someone else's.