One nice daemontools-encore feature not mentioned here: support for multiprocess services. By default, services run in their own process group, and `svc -t` and friends will cleanly signal the entire process group. Classic daemontools and all the derivatives I'm aware of will spin off orphans when you send TERM to a multiprocess service (eg, anything that involves a shell pipeline) like

    #!/bin/sh
    while true; do
      tar czf - data | ssh backup tar xzf -
      sleep 60
    done

If you've ever admin'ed a multiprocess service, you know how annoying the orphan problem can be.

> Attempts to package this for Debian Linux have not got off the ground...

I've got a PPA for daemontools-encore here [1], if you're interested. Be aware that the package itself is named daemontools so that it functions as a drop-in replacement for classic daemontools, and plays nicely with the daemontools-run package.

> and it is not in the BSD ports/packages trees...

This info is out of date, daemontools-encore 1.10 is in the FreeBSD ports tree [2].

[1] https://launchpad.net/~alangrow/+archive/ubuntu/daemontools-...

[2] http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/daemontools-encore/