This is alpha software, so be gentle with it! This package's main purpose is to give you tools to run services under svscan controlled supervises in a sysV like init environment. In particular, the package -- Sets up dt-svscan.init which starts/stops svscan and the supervises under svscan's control. -- Sets up dt-runlevel.init which manages all the runlevel changes for the services running under svscan. In fact, dt-svscan.init and dt-runlevel.init provide an environment that functions on its own. This means that once dt-svscan.init started svscan, just given the runlevel to change to, dt-runlevel.init decides which services to stop/start, and in which order. The order in which services are started/stopped are set up by the administrator using the runlevelconf package. Since setting up daemons to run under svscan requires to set up run scripts and links in svscan's service directory, the package provides run files for a large number of services (including all the qmail daemons), and two scripts, add-service.sh and remove-service.sh. To see how things would approximately work, it is probably best to give an example (the detailed installation notes are in INSTALL, and the detailed description of how things work is in MANUAL). Suppose you would like to set up qmail, qmail-smtpd and dnscache to run under svscan. First, you install the basic dt-run files along with qmail's run files: make ibase iqmail After this, you will make appropriate entries in /etc/inittab that would run dt-svscan.init and dt-runlevel.init. The qmail daemons's run files are put under /var/service. For example, for qmail-smtpd, you will have /var/service/qmail-smtpd/run /var/service/qmail-smtpd/log/run /var/service/qmail-smtpd/log/main/ Next you set up the run files for dnscache by running dnscache-conf dnscache dtlog /var/service/dnscache Then you run add-service.sh qmail qmail-smtpd dnscache The three main things the add-service.sh script does are: First, it sets up the programs (in fact, they are just links to a "meta" init file) qmail.init, qmail-smtpd.init and dnscache.init in /usr/local/sbin. You can use these programs to manually start/stop and signal the services---as you used to do with init scripts in /etc/rc.d/init.d/. So you can do qmail.init reload to let qmail-send know about your new virtualdomain. Second, add-service.sh lets runlevelconf know at which runlevels the services should be started/stopped. Finally, add-service.sh sets up the links in svscan's directory, /service, to /var/service/{qmail,qmail-smtpd,dnscache}. The script add-service.sh makes sure that these services get started in the current runlevel only if they are supposed to run. If you decide to use rblsmtpd instead of bare qmail-smtpd, you can just do remove-service.sh qmail-smtpd add-service.sh rblsmtpd In the MANUAL file, you can read about how to tell add-service.sh at which runlevels you want a particular service to be run, and in what order the services should be started. You can also add a service to the list of services add-service.sh knows about. Besides the qmail run files, if you do make iother run scripts for many common services are installed, such as for telnetd, rlogind, wuftpd, proftpd, rsync.