There is also s6, s6-rc and its associated tools, done in essentially the same spirit, micromanaged into the smallest possible units. At least it feels like that. Which leads to strange experiences if you lazily try to integrate them into your system, because they are so fast that you almost never see them appear in something like htop, not even as a short blip. Even on some small ARM idling at 200Mhz. One really has to watch the logs, and do it in a systematical way. But i like that. One of the rare pieces of software which don't make me aggressive or want to vomit, like very precise and exact clock work, or very good bicycle gearing. Silent and satisfying!

[1] http://skarnet.org/software/

Then there is

[2] http://web.obarun.org/software/

which is an attempt to ease that micromanagement from an archlinux derivative, which uses this instead of systemd.

Furthermore there is

[3] https://jdebp.eu/Softwares/nosh/

with the same goals, looking very impressive on paper, but written in C++? I don't know what to make of that. But probably try it out some time, even if only for the user space virtual terminal from there.

So... daemon tooling is far from dead!

   diff -Nur admin.orig/daemontools-0.76/src/supervise.c admin/daemontools-0.76/src/supervise.c
   --- admin.orig/daemontools-0.76/src/supervise.c 2010-02-19 11:08:15.000000000 +0100
   +++ admin/daemontools-0.76/src/supervise.c 2010-02-19 12:53:16.000000000 +0100
   @@ -86,6 +86,8 @@
    
    const char *run[2] = { "./run", 0 };
    
   +int flagfailed = 0;
   +
    void trystart(void)
    {
      int f;
   @@ -94,6 +96,7 @@
        case -1:
          strerr_warn4(WARNING,"unable to fork for ",dir,", sleeping 60 seconds: ",&strerr_sys);
          deepsleep(60);
   +      flagfailed = 1;
          trigger();
          return;
        case 0:
   @@ -153,6 +156,11 @@
          }
        }
    
   +    if (flagfailed && flagwant && flagwantup){
   +      flagfailed = 0;
   +      trystart();
   +    }
   +
        if (read(fdcontrol,&ch,1) == 1)
          switch(ch) {
    case 'd':
   diff -Nur admin.orig/daemontools-0.76/src/supervise.c admin/daemontools-0.76/src/supervise.c
   --- admin.orig/daemontools-0.76/src/supervise.c 2001-07-12 18:49:49.000000000 +0200
   +++ admin/daemontools-0.76/src/supervise.c 2012-12-23 21:54:20.437771704 +0100
   @@ -97,6 +97,8 @@
          trigger();
          return;
        case 0:
   +      setsid();
   +      setpgid(0,0);
          sig_uncatch(sig_child);
          sig_unblock(sig_child);
          execve(*run,run,environ);
   @@ -158,7 +160,7 @@
    case 'd':
      flagwant = 1;
      flagwantup = 0;
   -  if (pid) { kill(pid,SIGTERM); kill(pid,SIGCONT); flagpaused = 0; }
   +  if (pid) { killpg(pid,SIGTERM); killpg(pid,SIGCONT); flagpaused = 0; }
      announce();
      break;
    case 'u':
   @@ -173,29 +175,29 @@
      if (!pid) trystart();
      break;
    case 'a':
   -  if (pid) kill(pid,SIGALRM);
   +  if (pid) killpg(pid,SIGALRM);
      break;
    case 'h':
   -  if (pid) kill(pid,SIGHUP);
   +  if (pid) killpg(pid,SIGHUP);
      break;
    case 'k':
   -  if (pid) kill(pid,SIGKILL);
   +  if (pid) killpg(pid,SIGKILL);
      break;
    case 't':
   -  if (pid) kill(pid,SIGTERM);
   +  if (pid) killpg(pid,SIGTERM);
      break;
    case 'i':
   -  if (pid) kill(pid,SIGINT);
   +  if (pid) killpg(pid,SIGINT);
      break;
    case 'p':
      flagpaused = 1;
      announce();
   -  if (pid) kill(pid,SIGSTOP);
   +  if (pid) killpg(pid,SIGSTOP);
      break;
    case 'c':
      flagpaused = 0;
      announce();
   -  if (pid) kill(pid,SIGCONT);
   +  if (pid) killpg(pid,SIGCONT);
      break;
    case 'x':
      flagexit = 1;