Really good to see rational discussion of this stuff.
I personally love daemontools. I also love qmail and sawfish - they suit my needs better than the current "trendy" products. But if it takes someone with 10 years of Unix experience a few hours to get the gear all running, most linux users would really not get very far.
Why can't a "default" openacs install use rc.d files etc., and when you want a super duper 1mio hits/day server you can do it all by hand the way you like.
I liked the way our aolserver 3 installs were self-contained. Maybe we could build an aolserver 4 rpm with it's own tcl/tcllib etc. included. That way it's not a problem if the system has a non-threaded tcl installed.
I think email is less of an issue. All we need is:
1/ access to an inject program
2/ access to a maildir format mailbox which gets all the email to the chosen domain
And even (2) is optional.
