The road forward for systemd

I think that the daemon control system itself (whatever it is called) should be as intelligent as possible. If it can know that a daemon is borked and take remedial action, ie restart it sensibly until it is shown to be buggered and then give up, then great.

Even better if you could feed it rules of some sort that told it how to tell the difference between "recalcitrant" and "properly buggered".

Pretty much all systems I know of have a "status" subcommand to the service/daemon controller - why not make it actually work properly to the point where you can rely on it *completely?

Basically, would it not be nice to be able to believe your service manager when it says that Apache is fine rather than reaching for Monit/Nagios/web browser.

If the Gentoo "/etc/init.d/<service> zap" command went away then this problem is solved.

(* => for a given value of completely, which at the moment on all systems I manage (Gentoo, SLES, Fedora, *buntu, Win{lots of different versions} is local knowledge and folklore)