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Comment by aeldidi | Hacker News Reader

They just mean service managers like SystemD and OpenRC prefer to handle daemonizing themselves, and thus would prefer that your program stay in the foreground and let them put it in the background.

From OpenRC’s docs[0]:

  Daemons must not fork. Any daemon that you would like to have monitored by supervise-daemon must not fork. Instead, it must stay in the foreground. If the daemon forks, the supervisor will be unable to monitor it.

  If the daemon can be configured to not fork, this should be done in the daemon's configuration file, or by adding a command line option that instructs it not to fork to the command_args_foreground variable shown below.

The “undesired” or “controversial” part is whether programs should do it themselves or not.

[0]: https://github.com/OpenRC/openrc/blob/master/supervise-daemo...

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deamontools was the first supervisor service I used that required that programs not background themselves, it even included a tool for preventing "legacy" daemons from doing so.

It made a lot of sense to me at the time and honestly felt easier. Going back to init.d or upstart just felt like a step backward and so much more complicated that it needed to be. Then SystemdD comes along an have the same expectation and things makes sense again and writing "startup scripts became as easy almost as it was with daemontools.

inetd, the "super server" from 4.3BSD, supported this in addition to handling the listening socket. For reasons I don't fully understand, inetd fell out of favor despite having been installed and running by default on pretty much every *BSD and Linux server for decades.

I recall that inetd started a new instance of the demon for every incoming connection, and this caused lots of processes when lots of connections happened.

I don’t recall whether you could tell inetd not to do that.

inetd could pass the listening socket to the process. That was the `wait|nowait` field in /etc/inetd.conf. The typical config for TCP used with services like finger was `nowait`, which meant inetd would listen on a socket and spawn a new process for every incoming connection, without waiting for a previously spawned process to exit. But in `wait` mode it would spawn the process when it detected a connection, pass the listening socket (not connected socket) as fd 0, then wait for the server to exit before polling the listening socket again.

inetd was (remains?) a perfectly useful solution in this space. It just maybe needs some love to add some convenience features. Off the top of my head: 1) ability to split /etc/inetd.conf into, e.g., /etc/inetd.conf.d; 2) ability to trigger a restart of a specific service, rather than restarting the entirety of inetd.

Couple things come to mind.

One, is that HTTP took over the role of a lot of simple servers, thus something like Apache and CGI-BIN was used in place of inetd.

Second, with the rise of interpreted languages (i.e. Perl et al), forking became more expensive. With binary programs, forking tends to be cheap (in a multi-use case) since the executable page are shared across processes. While the interpreter runtime itself is shared (being compiled), the actual script is not (having to be loaded for each instance).

The HTTP servers managed that better (through modules, FastCGI, etc.), so that space didn't really advance under the guise of inetd.

Make no mistake, an inetd service is "fast enough" for a wide array of use cases today, both compiled and interpreted, simply because the hardware is much better today. But, still, when folks think "ad hoc" service today, they're likely turning to HTTP today anyway.

Daemontools is tiny, systemd is huge, but the only thing I like about systemd, daemontools could also do.

Have you seen s6?

I’d say it’s the modern-day equivalent of daemontools, and it’s under active development.

https://skarnet.org/software/

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