polyamory – supports simultaneous relationships

poly [-dpt]

poly supports simultaneous host-to-host relationships.

By default, poly searches for and upgrades any preexisting monogamous relationship to polyamory. Results may be mixed. To suppress this behavior, use kill -9 to terminate existing relationships first.

Polyamory comes in many variations. Best results are obtained running identical or closely compatible variations. See also: poly-nonhierarchical, poly-hierarchical, and poly-solo. Less compatible variations include: swinging. Poly is not compatible with cheating.

It is possible but not recommended to connect two hosts, one running poly and one running monogamy, but this requires an experienced system administrator and increases the risk of system instability. Resource utilization (see relationship-discussion) will likely be higher with this combination.

It is normal to have one or more relationship-discussion background processes per relationship. In some cases, O(n^2) processes are required for n relationships. These child processes automatically consume all available CPU cycles, and are necessary for system stability.

-p In promiscuous mode, poly will fork additional instances any time it sees an open port on a compatible host. This can be resource intensive and is not recommended to run indefinitely, although it is common for users to start poly in this state.

-d In debug mode, extra relationship-discussions are spawned. Poly is notoriously difficult to debug. If relationship-discussion is insufficient, if CPU utilization is too high, or system instability exceeds comfortable limits, use couples-counseling to process debug output.

-t To prevent errors during initialization and facilitate user adoption, poly supports a -t flag for trial mode. However, this is a dummy flag and has no effect.

Poly by default operates in a time-sharing mode. For real-time relationship parallelism, it may be necessary to install the threesome, orgy, and/or kitchen-table packages.

It is recommended to run sti-scanner at regular intervals while running poly and furthermore to ensure that all relationship endpoints run sti-scanner. Alternatively, you can run poly in a private cloud, although not all benefits of poly are available in this configuration.

It is normal after installing poly to sometimes wish to revert to monogamy, especially after during periods of high system instability. While this works in some cases, running poly modifies many components of the host operating system, sometimes permanently. Results with reverting to monogamy may vary.