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.