The FreeBSD wiki page[0] has an updates page, with this, from a month and a half ago:
> 20140910: Outback Dingo has made available an older port of pfSense's launchd_xml.
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2 comments
The launchd_xml code is mildly toxic for openlaunchd, it's derived off of the Apple Public Source License codebase instead of the newer Apache 2.0 licensed codebase that openlaunchd derives from.
IMO the ASL is going to be required to get FreeBSD to adopt openlaunchd at some point
And a link to the repository: https://github.com/outbackdingo/launchd_xml
Note that the pfsense / outbackdingo launchd did something rather naughty -- it put the xml parser back in pid 1 which was intentionally not there by design at Apple.
tl;dr even if you could convince the FreeBSD devs that launchd is a great idea they wouldn't accept this as-is.
doesn't launchd on osx also parse plist xml files? How are those handled?
There's another binary that does the processing and the data is sent to the launchd daemon over a Mach-specific IPC channel that FreeBSD doesn't have.
OS X has a binary plist format, too. Maybe it uses that to bootstrap and does xml parsing in sub-processes.