Daemon management on Amiga OS

[cgutjahr]

If there's one thing AmigaOS definitely doesn't need it's daemons or service managers or whatever you want to call them. The whole point of AmigaOS is its modularity - of course it's the TCP stack's job to start a service if a request comes in  via a certain port. And if I need to react to a file changing or a device being mounted, I tell dos.library about it, because that is (or should be) dos.library's effing job.

daemons make sense in a multiuser-environment, where anything running in my session can never directly talk to anything important - because another user's session might be trying to do the exact same thing at the exact same time. But on AmigaOS? It would just introduce another software layer and making stuff more complex because it might make things slightly more comfortable is never a good idea. "Keep it simple, stupid".

[cgutjahr]

Not at all - that's the task of an inet daemon, not a TCP stack.

On Unix or Windows? Sure. On AmigaOS? Certainly not. A computer running AmigaOS shouldn't answer requests coming in over the network. - it issues requests, but that's it. If you need to FTP or Telnet to your Amiga box over the local network in case of an emergency or when setting up the machine, a minimalistic approach using the TCP stack works just fine.

If you implement a network daemon, you need a detailed user and rights management system next. And that doesn't make much sense without the ability to have several users logged into the box simultaneously. Both of these things require a much more complicated startup process involving an init system, i.e. the dreaded "service manager" NinjaCyborg mentioned. And suddenly, AmigaOS is just like any other OS out there - just that it has the close button on the top left instead of the top right of the window...