[silentbicycle]

Erlang has heart (http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/heart.html) for similar reasons. Of course, it also has distribution, for when the whole computer it's running on dies.

I use runit (http://smarden.org/runit/) instead of daemontools (same sort of thing, but a bit less opinionated about e.g. where it gets installed). Rather than expecting every daemon to implement its own supervisor, logging system, etc. correctly, just use one of those.

[jrockway]

Does daemontools care anymore? I use "supervise ~/.dotfiles/service | readproctitle ............." to start my user-local services when I log in. Works like a charm.

[silentbicycle]

It's been a while since I installed daemontools. IIRC it created a bunch of root directories (e.g. /commands). There was also an OpenBSD port for runit already.