Feat: Mac Port

[jgiles]

Request: Ability to install and run shpool on OSX machines.

Management of persistent shell sessions on a Mac is certainly a niche usecase compared to e.g. sessions on a Linux box accessed from a Mac. However, that capability could be useful in the case of Mac desktop/home servers (e.g. the new Mac Mini devices) or in Mac build farms.

Is support for Mac a goal of shpool?

Depending on the level of difficulty, I might be interested in assisting, given some pointers on how to help.

I see work on a Mac port is mentioned by @ethanpailes here: #177 (comment)

Is that referring to the draft changes here from @jrmlhermitte :

• https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool/pull/48/files
• jrmlhermitte/shpool_pty@16b9d1a

or are there other work-in-progress artifacts for Mac support?

[jrmlhermitte]

Unfortunately there is no work at the moment. I'm unable to commit more time to open source for a while. If you are interested please go ahead :).

That PR was just initial investigation to see what we might need to change to get it working, but there is still a lot more work to be done.

I will let @ethanpailes answer more but if you wanted to try making the right hacks to get it to build all over again, I think that's the right way to go to get started. Thanks in advance for the interest! :)

[jgiles]

OK, thank you! If I have a chance I will poke around a bit.

Just to be clear though: I think it's worth some real consideration of the question "Is support for Mac a goal of shpool?"

There's the initial implementation to get it working, but there would also be some ongoing cost to the project maintaining cross-platform support. I want to make sure there is appetite for that, given that Mac is likely to remain a less-common usecase. The alternative would be to explicitly say the project doesn't have plans to support Mac and guide folks with that usecase toward tmux/etc.

[jayvdb]

https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool_pty has been archived. :/

Currently I see

error[E0425]: cannot find function `ptsname_r` in crate `libc`
    --> /Users/jayvdb/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-1949cf8c6b5b557f/shpool_pty-0.3.1/src/fork/pty/master/mod.rs:73:29
     |
  73 |                 match libc::ptsname_r(fd, data as *mut libc::c_char, buf.len()) {
     |                             ^^^^^^^^^ help: a function with a similar name exists: `ptsname`
     |
    ::: /Users/jayvdb/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-1949cf8c6b5b557f/libc-0.2.176/src/unix/mod.rs:1602:5
     |
1602 |     pub fn ptsname(fd: c_int) -> *mut c_char;
     |     ----------------------------------------- similarly named function `ptsname` defined here

For more information about this error, try `rustc --explain E0425`.

[ethanpailes]

That repo should not be archived. I just unarchived it and am looking into why it was archived in the first place.

[seruman]

I hacked my way in these two branches to make it work on macOS;

• shell-pool/shpool_pty@master...seruman:shpool_pty:ptsname_r-macos
• master...seruman:shpool:macos

By no means I think ready for upstream -little to no experience in Rust-, but they get the job done for me as they are.

[jrmlhermitte]

That's impressively very little change. If this works this is great. Can you please make a pull request so we can review it?
I'll try to test it in the coming days.

[ethanpailes]

Yeah, even if things are a little wonky, I would be happy to merge. Some amount of mac support is better than none.

[c22]

As far as I know, this was effectively blocked by shell-pool/shpool_pty#4 but that was merged recently 🥳

Would the shpool team be willing to take some of the changes from @seruman?

There was also an attempt to fix things in #48, but I think upstreaming seruman's fork is probably a nicer fix.

I'm also happy to spend some time on this if desired!

[jrmlhermitte]

Closing #48 because it is too stale (have had no bandwidth for this).

Please yes @seruman or @c22 make a PR!

[ethanpailes]

@c22 I cut a new release of shpool_pty so that that change could get picked up. I think @seruman said they had a version of shpool that was building on mac and they were thinking of upstreaming it. If you want to do the work of converting their fork into a PR for the main shpool repo though, we'd be happy to take the patch. (though if you are working on it actively @seruman speak up so that @c22 doesn't waste the time).

[seruman]

@ethanpailes i won't be able to allocate time for this for some time. @c22 feel free to take over it; master...seruman:shpool:macos

AFAIR replacing INotifyWatcher with RecommendedWatcher caused config watcher tests to fail on macOS tho.

[ethanpailes]

No pressure. Thanks for making the fork in the first place!

[c22]

I hope this is along the lines of what you guys are after

#300